An advisor to three Republican presidents, Clinton brought him to the White House in 1993 in a move that caused resentment among the White House staff. Gergen left the administration in December 1994. He is the author of a 2000 book on his White House years, Eyewitness to Power: The Essence of Leadership, Nixon to Clinton. Interview conducted June, 2000 by Chris Bury The transition. You were down there as an observer for U.S. News and World Report. But you'd been in three other administrations. What did you sense about the transition and how this newly elected president was putting together his team? What I sensed was that they had a fantastic public relations machine going in Little Rock so that he got only 43 percent of the vote in the election but by the end of the transition he was up to 59 percent approval. But beneath the public relations machine, a real mess was building up in my judgment. They did not seize the transition as a way to govern. It became more of an extension of the campaign with the public relations side of it than it was the movement from campaigning to governing. And I think that cost them a lot when they got to the White House. Ordinarily, in a transition, what you want to do is to make sure you get your team ready, to make sure you get your program ready and to make sure you get your president ready so he's physically ready, rested and ready to go. And they did pick a good economic team but on the rest of it he, he put his White House team together at the last minute. People didn't know where they were going to be sitting until the last minute, didn't know what their jobs were going to be. He didn't have his program together by the time he hit Washington, and when he came to Washington he was exhausted. You know, kept running during the transition. He kept out there, physically out there, and instead of getting a rest,by the time he got to Washington, he was a very tired guy. And I think that left him in Washington--a man who is as talented as he is, his judgment was not as good as it was when he was governor. The first two problems that hit him as president were the Attorney General nomination thing, and gays in the military. To what extent were both of those things a result of sloppiness in the transition? I think that the continuing bumbles on the attorney general decision came out of two things. One, they were being so fastidious about filling the slot with a woman that they weren't looking for merit, they were looking for a woman. And as a result of that they found one person they hadn't checked out enough, and they went through another, and that sort of thing and wound up with a third candidate. But it took a long, long time to get that in place. You have to give him credit for diversity. This is the first president in history who appointed the Cabinet where white males were in a minority. That's something different, that's new. And he got the diversity he was looking for but in the obsession with diversity, he, it was so slow that he wasn't ready to govern. And it wasn't just the attorney general slot that was so slow in being filled. The fact was because they took so much time on the attorney general, they never got the sub-Cabinet done. So, what you had at the Justice Department was a shell of a department. You know, Web Hubbell was basically running the Justice Department for a good long time there at the beginning. And whatever you may think about Web Hubbell you needed more people there in place to really run a department. And that was true not only at Justice, it was true in a lot of different parts. I think that the problem goes back to the fact that it's a bigger leap from a place like Little Rock to Washington than people imagine. Bill Clinton, one of the most talented political figures of his generation, certainly, found it much tougher. It was much, much tougher than he anticipated coming here and he did not surround himself with a lot of Washington veterans early on. But he did that on purpose. I mean there was, as you recall, a tremendous resentment among the campaign from anyone who had been associated with the graybeards of Washington. Those sorts of people were specifically not welcome. They were not welcome. And I think that was a terrible mistake. If I can only suggest two contrasts. One, when Bill Clinton put together his campaign he reached out far and wide for people of all different backgrounds regardless of what their loyalties had been before. And as a result he got a crackerjack team. He had a really first-rate campaign team. But when it came to governing, he did not use that same sort of net to bring in the best. If someone had worked for the Carter White House, it was almost by definition no place for him in the Clinton White House. Let me give you an example. Mack McLarty, who is a wonderful gentleman, to come as Chief of Staff, wanted to have Stu Eizenstat as his deputy. Eizenstat was ready to come. He had been Jimmy Carter's chief domestic advisor and is just a first-rate public servant. Eizenstat was vetoed by the high command of the Clinton team because he worked for Carter. As a result, McLarty never had the man who would have been so valuable to him, right from the beginning, who really knew how to run a White House. And, as it's turned out, of course, Eizenstat went on to work over in the foreign policy side and, of course, he has distinguished himself at the State Department, the Treasury Department, because he is so good. But it was the nixing of people like that. They nixed Eizenstat, they nixed Mike McCurry from coming into the White House. Mike McCurry could have come in and he and Dee Dee would have been a terrific team early on. But they nixed McCurry because he had worked for Bob Kerrey and he'd been for other people. Jump ahead to May of 1993, how are you approached to come to the White House and what is the argument, what is the pitch that you are given? It was a bolt out of the blue for me when the calls started coming. I was working for U.S. News and World Report and writing editorials urging the administration to pull itself together. I had great hopes that Bill Clinton would launch a new bipartisan progressive era of reform. I thought that was really important for the country. I had been writing pieces about, do this, and do that, please. And finally Mack McLarty called me and said, "We don't know each other but would you come over and have lunch with me and talk about some of the things that you've been writing about? I would like to explore some of these issues with you." So, I went over to the White House mess and I'm sure Mike had this wired but about three-quarters of the way through the lunch Bill Clinton came into the mess to say hello, and we talked for a while. I'd known the president for a long time. And we talked for a while about what he was up to. And then the lunch ended and, and Mack McLarty said to me, "Look, we're really looking for someone with experience,for a graybeard to come in now. Do you have any recommendations? Could you think about it?" I said, "Sure, I'll think about it." So, he called me that Sunday at home and said, "Have you thought about it?" And I said yes---one of the people I recommended was Stu Eizenstat. I recommended all Democrats. But Stu Eizenstat I thought would be a terrific person to come in. I didn't know the history from before that. And then three or four days later Mack called back and said, "The president and I have been talking about this and we'd really like to ask you to consider filling this job that we have." That set off a whirlwind of activity over the next 72 hours or so in which I talked to the president. He made a very strong pitch to me by telephone. I met with him personally. I met with the first lady personally. I had extensive conversations with the vice president as well as Mack McLarty. Did you tell the president what you thought was going wrong with his administration at that point? Well, I didn't need to tell him what was going wrong because he told me. He was very reflective. He thought that the administration was way out of position politically. That he had intended to come as a New Democrat and he was perceived as being way off to the left and he had to get back to the center and he had to get back to working with Republicans and he thought I could be a potential bridge to help get back to the center where he wanted to govern. What did you tell him? Well, I told him that he was terribly out of position and that he had lurched to the left when he came in and it sent signals to people like me, who thought he was going to be a centrist Democrat, that he had lost his moorings. I also had a private conversation with the first lady saying, it's widely perceived on the outside that you're the one who's pulled him left and that he can't govern here. And then she made a pitch to me about well, that she was misunderstood, that, in fact, I should remember that she had been a Goldwater girl in her youth and that she was very much for traditional social values and she thought he ought to be back to the center. And they also felt that they didn't understand Washington very well. They didn't understand the dynamics of the press corps. They were having a hard time figuring out Capitol Hill. They were asking the right questions. It was just the fact that it was several months into the Administration and they had paid a fearful price by that time. I mean he was in a pretty deep hole several months in. I believe Sam Donaldson had declared him dead politically just a few weeks after he took office. And there were widespread feelings in Washington that he was in over his head. That they had slipped on one banana peel after another. So, the call to me was emblematic of someone in Washington who understood the press, who knew something about bipartisan politics, who knew something about the White House and perhaps could help them right themselves to come out of the ditch. When you get to the White House, what are your first early impressions of how it's working? The thing that struck me the most forcefully when I first got to the White House was the fact that Bill Clinton, a man I had known for 10 years, self-confident, optimistic, always a man who, if he made a mistake on Tuesday and got knocked down Wednesday, he'd bounce right back up and be sunny. And here was a fellow who had lost his way and most importantly he had lost his self-confidence. He didn't believe in himself in the same way he did, the man I'd known. He was a very, very different person. And what I had learned from other presidents, particularly with Reagan, was that the best thing a staff can do is don't try to reinvent the person. Instead try to help the person bring the best out of themselves. We said, "Let Reagan be Reagan." And my view was let Clinton be Clinton. He's got it within him. He's got the resources within him but he'd lost his confidence. And so what we tried to do more than anything else in my judgment was to create an environment for him in which he could make his own recovery. To tighten the place up, to get the organization tightened up, and to give him the opportunity to find himself again. You say, "get the organization tightened up." You hear and read these accounts of endless meetings where the president is engaged by practically anybody who walked past. That policy discussions go on until 2 - 3 o'clock in the morning. That there's this sense of a free flowing dorm room almost. I mean, how would you put it? Well, early when I got there somebody told me, I think the vice president had this view--the comparison was have you ever watched 10-year olds play soccer? And if you have, what you notice is they never hold position. They're always clustered around the ball. There are tons of them clustered around the ball. This is what was happening in the White House unfortunately. Bill Clinton was the ball and wherever he was, there were tons of people clustered around. And it was for me, who had come from Republican administrations, which are very buttoned up, very hierarchical, very orderly, it was stunning. I mean I realize the Democrats are different in some ways. They like a little chaos. They think it's more creative. And, hey--who's to say they're wrong. But in this case, it was totally chaotic. And I think that from the president's point of view it was unsettling. He had no time for reflection. He had no time to rest. And I think it was almost like he was in this never-never land, he was in the fun house. He didn't know how to find his way out of it. And it took a while to let that sort of settle this down, slow this down, let him find himself and he'll be fine. And he did. I mean he worked his way out of the hole. But it took a while. I will just give you an example. I am used to a White House where normally the president is in the Oval Office and there is a fairly orderly discussion, it may be three people, may be four people, but not very many and everybody sort of waits for somebody else to speak. And more than once the situation I saw was Bill Clinton was going to go out to the Rose Garden to do an event and the press would be out there. And suddenly, ten minutes before the event, people would pour into the office, to give him advice. And everybody would be milling around as the fellow was trying to get himself ready to go out there. And somebody would be whispering in his ear, somebody would stick a piece of paper in his pocket, somebody would say, "You got to say this," and somebody else would say, "No, no, no, you got to say that." It bordered on chaos. And I think that he realized that he needed to stop that and he did. And over time he became a lot more effective as president over time. I think that should be emphasized, but in the beginning I think that he suffered a lot. This cannot be overemphasized enough. He suffered a lot from not bringing in some people from the Carter administration and from the previous Democratic administrations who knew Washington, who knew the White House and who knew what it took to govern. He would have been a lot better had he integrated the campaign team, very talented people, George Stephanopoulos, Dee Dee Myers, Paul Begala, James Carville, Mandy Grunwald, Stan Greenberg. They are all very, very talented. And he needed those people. They were vital to him. But he also needed a few of the graybeards. He needed the Bob Strauss types or he needed the Stu Eizenstats who could come in and say "Okay, that's all great, that's the energy of the campaign, but now to translate that into governing, you've got to put together an integrated team." Once again, I have to go back--I think the best transition in modern times has been the Reagan transition. Jack Kennedy also had a fantastically good transition. One of the things that distinguished Reagan was that he brought his California team with him but then he reached out and got Jim Baker straight out of the Washington establishment, in effect, to be his chief of staff. And he blended the Washington folks with the California folks and by that he got a very strong team. And what Clinton tried was bringing his campaign team in, but didn't reach out and get any of these veterans. You mentioned that you saw the president lacking the confidence that you had seen him demonstrate before. One of the things that you and Mandy Grunwald did was look at videos from Clinton as candidate to Clinton as president. What did you notice in the comparison of those videos and then what did you do about it? Yeah. Well, the credit for the videos belongs to Mandy and I didn't have anything to do with the production of them. I did see them. And the videos showed that the president when he was campaigning spoke with a vision about what kind of country we could be. He was thematic and he was sort of lofty. And he talked about the problems facing us and the solutions facing us as a people. When he became president the conversation on the news was all about process, it was about this committee or that committee and "We've got a group working on this." It lost that sense of vision, that sense of what drew people to him. And I remember very well a meeting with him in which he complained, "I'm becoming the mechanic in chief and I don't want to be there. That's not who I got elected to be." You know, Ross Perot had that wonderful metaphor about looking under the hood of the car and figuring out what's wrong. The president is not supposed to be the guy under the hood of the car. The president is supposed to be the person in the driver's seat figuring out what the road map looks like and where you're going. Was part of it Clinton's fault? He was known to be hands-on, he wanted to be in every decision. In fact, people have told us that he couldn't stand not being in decisions and discussions. Bill Clinton, because his mind is so quick and because he's so comprehensive in what he thinks about, he did want to be in every decision. I think he realized after a while he was getting lost in the trees and couldn't see the forest and he needed to sort of pull back from that he could not only think in, in a different way but he could present to the country a different sense of what his presidency was all about. He'd never got quite into the detailed hands-on relationship that say, Jimmy Carter did. Remember Carter got into the point where he was actually approving who would play on the White House tennis court and he would look at the schedule. Clinton never got that far. But what instead was happening was that on policy issues, he would dive in and get deeper and deeper and deeper and he could get mired down in the details, and it was really hard. There is such a thing in government as paralysis by analysis. By the time you got to the White House, relations with the press in this town were already pretty bad. A couple of things had happened. For one thing, the hallway had been blocked off to George's office, but generally there was a lot of enmity there. Where did that come from? The press had fallen in love with Bill Clinton for a portion of the campaign. And then they started falling out of love. That frequently happens with candidates. But the Clintons had gone through a just grueling experience with the press during the campaign, especially in New Hampshire and they came out of that very banged up, psychologically wounded by it and angry. There was a lot of hostility deep down about what these people did to us in the campaign. They didn't treat us fairly. Mrs. Clinton felt that very strongly. So that when they got to the White House, there was a sense, "We can't trust these people. Let's put them somewhere else. Let's take them out of the White House." So, there'd be early on the discussions were, before I got there, "Let's put them over in the Old Executive Building across the street, get them out of the White House." Now, they realized after they looked at it that that was not a good solution. But the compromise was to close the door between the press and the offices of George Stephanopoulos and Dee Dee Myers. Now, it's always been my understanding that both George and Dee Dee wanted that door open. But it was ordered closed over their objections. And may seem to the outside world so what? But it's actually quite important to the free flow of information in the White House. So when I got there, I had this discussion with Mrs. Clinton as part of my going in--"Look, if I'm going to come in, I've got to understand how you feel about going to the center, and how you feel about working with Republicans. I can't come in here as someone who has worked in three Republican administrations and have you anti-Republican. I'll never get anything done. I can't be helpful. And, I've got to talk to you about the press. You know, if there's really going to be a war with the press, I can't be helpful to you." And she said, "We want to end this war. This is not where we want to be." And I said, "How about opening the door?" And she said, "I can't believe it hasn't been done already." And she opened it. She got it open right away. And I was really surprised. I didn't know what to think of that. I never have known what to think of that. But, they then went--and they'd been planning this long before I got there---they had a series of dinners that summer with the press and for a while there was a truce. It lasted maybe until almost the end of the year of 1993, the first year.