You were involved in an episode which sort of illustrated the "us versus them attitude," when The Wall Street Journal preparing a sort of series of what were relatively hostile editorials asking questions like, "Who was Vince Foster?" The Journal calls and they want a picture. What happens? I thought my role early on for better or for worse, was to see if we couldn't sort of build a truce with the press and get to a more normal relationship with the press, with the Congress, with the leaders of Washington. And so when The Wall Street Journal was looking for pictures, knowing they were going to do the drawings of these people and knowing that they were probably going to be critical--I mean The Wall Street Journal didn't pull any punches about how critical it was of the Clinton administration--my view was, "Look guys, they don't like you. They're never going to like you. But you're crazy if you don't sort of act like this is a professional operation. Of course we'll send you the picture. This is public information. You are public figures." And Vince Foster and Bill Kennedy did send their pictures up there and The Journal did nail them. But it was a lot better. And The Journal called back and said, you know, at least you guys are talking to us. Now, this is the reason I want to go back to the Washington experience. This is not rocket science. Relationships with the press are a matter of pure professionalism. They are professionals. They have a job to do. It's not your job. It's a different job. You've got a job to do and you've got to have a professional to professional trust, a relationship of trust. Even though they're going to nail you sometimes. And my experience from Watergate on has been you're better off acting like this is an important part of the process and let's open up to it, then you are to go out hostilely and say we're not going to cooperate with you guys on anything. To me there was a significant turning point in the relationship with the press that led to the Whitewater Independent Counsel. And George Stephanopoulos, and I were both involved with this. There came a time when The Washington Post was seeking Whitewater documents and this was in the late Fall, early Winter, 1993. And they sent a letter over asking for the documents and, and the letter sat there for two weeks without being, without getting an answer. And then Bob Kaiser of The Post called me and said, "You're fairly new over there, still--you know this is serious. We feel like we're getting the run-around." To make a long story short, Bruce Lindsay, Mark Gearan and I went to The Post. Mark and I--Mark was then communications director--recommended to the Clintons that they turn over the documents. We had a climatic meeting with the president who agreed to turn over all the documents but then told me, you got to get Mrs. Clinton to agree to this before we do it. And I couldn't get it on her calendar. They wouldn't let me in to see her. I got into a stall situation. And eventually a letter went back to The Post saying, no deal. In fact, it was a lot tougher than that. What did that tell you about the relationship when it would come to something like that where Mrs. Clinton obviously was driving the ball here? Well, there are a couple of things. Let me finish upon the press story and then I'll come back on the the Clinton story. The press side of this was--this was a turning point for The Washington Post. They made a very serious re-request for documents. And we, in effect, put a stick in their eye. And it was just as sure as night follows day they then put a large team of investigators on the situation and they really went after them. And it was clear it was coming, and the Clintons were told it was coming. But Len Downey of The Post called me and said, "This is not personal, this is just business. But I want to tell you something, you folks have made a horrible mistake and we have no choice now but to look at this very seriously." And once that started, that's the flagship newspaper of politics in Washington, everybody else got into this thing. Newsweek was there, everybody else was there. And it really put the pressure on where are the documents, and eventually as you recall, the Clintons decided to voluntarily turn the documents over to the Justice Department and they, themselves, called for an Independent Counsel. And I think it was very symbolically important that on January 20, 1994, exactly one year after he'd taken the oath of office, the Independent Counsel was appointed. And Mr. Fiske came in and said, "There is no limit to what I'm looking at." And that's exactly where he was going. I honestly believe that had we turned over the documents to The Washington Post in late 1993, we would not have had this hunt in the press for the documents and hunting down the Clintons. We never would have had an Independent Counsel appointed in 1994. There would never have been a Ken Starr. And there might have been a Monica Lewinsky in Bill Clinton's life, but I don't think we ever would have heard about her. What did that episode tell you about the power of Hillary Rodham Clinton? Well, I think to be fair to the president, Bill Clinton is a man who likes to share power and the spotlight. He doesn't mind other people doing that. And he was very generous in bringing the vice president into a position of real authority. I think the vice president had more authority in this administration than any other one. But I also think it led him ultimately into creation of what amounted to a co-presidency in a variety of serious ways. So, that she wasn't making all the decisions, but she did have veto authority over some important issues. And that put her in a situation which I think is unprecedented in American history. You can perhaps go back to the late period of Woodrow Wilson when he had a stroke and his wife, Edith, was making many decisions. But there's no other, I think, comparable time when we've had, in effect, a co-presidency. And as much as I admire Mrs. Clinton's capacity because she truly is a very talented woman--and she's passionate about the causes she believes in, and I think she's a well-centered person-- but there is no room in the White House for a co-presidency. It just does not work. You cannot have two different camps running the White House. You can't have a war room that goes off and does a budget and another war room goes off and does NAFTA and then you have a war room who goes off and does health care. You need an integrated process. And frankly, I think the president would have been better off had he asserted himself, his own authority, in doing that. --private residence of the Clintons to talk to them, to make a case for turning over these documents, what happens? Well, Mark Gearan and I had requested an opportunity to talk to the Clintons to persuade them to turn the documents over to the Washington Post and Mack McLarty, the Chief of Staff, said fine. He set up a meeting at 7 o'clock on a Friday night for us to go over to the residence and talk to the Clintons and made it clear that there would be lawyers there arguing the other side against disclosure because the lawyers were against it. I knew Bruce Lindsay would be against disclosure. So, Gearan and I go--Mark's the communications director, and, and we're over in the residence waiting for the elevator to go up to the meeting. The elevator comes. Stepping out of the elevator is Mack McLarty, the chief of staff. And I said, "Mack, what are you getting out of the elevator for?" And he said, "We're not going to have a meeting." I said, "What do you mean we're not going to have a meeting?" He said, "They called the lawyers over early and they heard the lawyers and they decided they're not turning the documents over." I said, you know, "You mean we're not going to have a chance to make the argument?" And he said, "No, you're not going to have the chance to make the argument." Is that because Mrs. Clinton's view is going to hold there? That she had held-- I didn't know. It was the first time I was really, really furious. Because I thought "Listen this is the whole reason you asked me to come in here was to help you on questions like this. And you don't have to agree with me, but at least hear my argument." And, and that's when I said to Mack, "This is unacceptable to me. I can't live this way. We've got tto make the argument to them, Mack. We've got to talk to them." And Mack agreed. He said, it's only fair that they--and as a result of that, that was Friday night, as a result of that Mack set up a coffee that Saturday morning just off the Oval Office after the president had his radio address to have a chance to talk to the president. And George Stephanopoulos came to that meeting and he also agreed on the need for disclosure. So, George was there. I made a very strong argument to the president why I felt we had to disclose the documents. George was strong. He was just right there, saying "You really got to do this." And Mack wanted to do it. And the president said, "Okay, I agree." Then he turned to me and said, "Now, you've got to go talk to my wife. You got to persuade her to do it." I said, "Okay, fine." They let me know what I was going to be doing, and I said fine. So, that Monday morning I started calling for an appointment. I never got an appointment. They kept on saying, "I'm sorry, she's too busy." Too busy. Which told you what? It told me she made up her mind, didn't really want to hear the argument. And it also told me that she had a veto power over this question. And that, in fact, there were on some issues there was a co-presidency. Now, frankly-- On what issues? I mean you say that Mrs. Clinton had veto power. She had veto power on these Whitewater documents--but on what else? Health care. The biggest single initiative of the first term was very, very much her--she was driving that. I mean if anything she was the prime player and he was not as fully engaged as he was on those other issues. And I think that was one of the reasons that he didn't bring to bear on it his very, very considerable political skills. I mean she's a great policy analyst, but he has perfect pitch in politics. He can hear, he can sense, he knows, he's finely tuned, about the political environment. I don't think that health care bill would ever have looked the way it did had he been fully engaged, had he been in charge of the process. But at the end of the day, I have to say this: the tragedy about the documents question was there was nothing in those documents that was criminally culpable. When the documents were all revealed, there were embarrassments in there, but there was nothing that was going to get them into legal trouble. But the failure to turn over the documents led to the outside Independent Counsel being brought in. And then led to these huge investigations that consumed much of his presidency. Of course, there was a debate within the White House whether the president, himself, ought to ask for an Independent Counsel. And some of the political team were strongly in support and, in fact, the president did, himself, ask for an Independent Counsel. We got put in a situation where the president had no choice and we had a long conversation. I was with him in Europe at that time--we were in Eastern Europe and there was a phone call back to the White House with some people gathered in the Oval Office and the president, and two or three of us, on the line in Eastern Europe. And it was a very spirited discussion. Bernie Nussbaum, who was the general counsel in the White House, argued very strenuously against calling for an Independent Counsel for a very good reason. He said, "Once you get an Independent Counsel the guy's going to have a fishing license. He can go anywhere. It's going to be unending trouble." I happened to agree with that argument. You never want an Independent Counsel because they're renegades. I mean they're sort of a runaway justice system in some way. But because we'd backed ourselves into a corner we really had no remaining choice. We were going to get an Independent Counsel anyway, it was clearly going to come. So I think the president made the right decision to say, let's go ahead and voluntarily call for one. This is a very emotional time for the president because his mother has died just before this. What was the mood like on that trip? I know that the president had a great sense of loss when his mother died. And I think that was one of those moments that you just don't want coming early in your presidency, because it took so much out of him emotionally. But I found him sticking pretty much to business. I didn't sense when I was there that he wasn't paying attention to the various meetings that he was going into. When we got to Moscow and he met with Yeltsin, he was in good shape there. He represented the country very, very well in his conversations with Yeltsin. On that trip, the pool reporter gets a couple of questions and they're Whitewater questions. The president is livid. He jumps up, pulls off his microphone. Watching that, what was going through your mind? This is a guy who's very tightly coiled. He's very, very tired. And he feels he's being hounded by the press. You know, the fact was the fat was in the fire by then. It was, you know, we were in a situation--that's why I come back to the notion had we gotten some things right to start with, I don't think we ever would've been in that situation. And I think that it's, it's hard to overemphasize how important some decisions are in the White House. You may not see them at the time as being that important, but in retrospect you look back and say, if we'd just done that thing, this never would've happened. During that same time Ted Koppel is there with a crew kind of chronicling all this, and he's supposed to talk to Clinton every night. One night Clinton doesn't come through, and Koppel is not happy about it. And the next night, the president does sit down with Koppel. But when the conversation again turns to Whitewater and you see the president's whole demeanor change. Yeah. It's important to understand that the president felt on Whitewater that he was being pursued unfairly. He was just being hounded by the press and by his enemies. He thought they had been whipped up by his enemies in Arkansas that there was nothing really to it. And that they were using this just to bang him over the head and he wanted to go on and be president. And I'm sympathetic to that. I understand why he felt that. But I had conversations with him. He said, "They are out there investigating my friends to within an inch of their lives. They're turning the lives of my friends in Arkansas upside down over these things and it's not right." He was morally outraged about it because he thought there was nothing in the Whitewater documents and the whole Whitewater episode that it was all that difficult. But he felt he was walking around Europe in one of his first major international outings, you know, he's got this 50-pound weight tied to him and he can't get rid of it. And so, this is not the way Bill Clinton likes to operate. Bill Clinton is a free spirit. He likes to be out there, you know, sort of be able to do this thing. And shape the world, he likes to be able to control his own destiny. He's one of these kind of people that wakes up every day and thinks "I can shape the world this way for me today." And suddenly, his world is being controlled by other people and that was very, very frustrating for him. Going back to Vince Foster's suicide, which is July of '93, you are at a party in Georgetown that night. And then you get the call. What happens? How does that affect Bill and Hillary Clinton? I happened to be at a dinner over at the home of Sally Quinn and Ben Bradlee that night. It was a large Washington dinner, one of their classic dinners. And Vernon Jordan was there and many others. And I got a call from Mark Gearan at the White House saying what had happened. And telling me that the president had gone on to the home of the widow. And that was only a few blocks away from where we were having dinner. I was terribly concerned that this would knock the stuffing out of him totally. That he would become terribly embittered about the Washington experience. That he would share the Vince Foster view expressed in Vince's note that in Washington ruining people is considered sport. And, you know, I knew that some of that burned in Bill Clinton already. So, I was very, very worried that losing his friend was going to knock him over. And that he would find it very difficult to govern again. So, Vernon and I went over to the Foster's home and what I found was that, in fact, he's a very tough fellow, Bill Clinton is. He was not there to get consolation from the people; he was there to give consolation. He was giving of himself to Mrs. Foster and to the others. He was going around hugging people, trying to buck them up. And we then went back to the residence. Mrs. Clinton was in Arkansas. We went back to the residence and sat there with him for maybe two or three hours talking. Mack McLarty was there and Mickey Kantor came in and Vernon was there, and the president was there. And I guess four or five of us. And Mrs. Clinton called and he had a long talk with her. I talked to her and found that she was in pretty good shape. She was shaken, but pretty good shape and was very concerned about him. But I found, in that evening one of Bill Clinton's great strengths. He's got a resilience, he's got an inner toughness that sometimes is not appreciated. You know, this is a man of many talents, and some weaknesses clearly. But resilience has been one of his great strengths. He bounces back from very tough situations. ... Not since Nixon, have we seen anybody as pilloried as Bill Clinton was in his early months and, in fact, as he has been through much of his Presidency. And he's bounced back better than almost anyone you might imagine. I think that's one of the reasons he just wears down his opponents. I mean his view of how you wear down somebody is you show for work every day and you don't let them get to you. And there were times, of course, when he gets angry and he gets frustrated-- What about his, his anger? Carville said it's like a thunderstorm, it blows in and there's lightening and thunder and then it blows out. Somebody else called it "the wave." Did you see Clinton get angry and did he ever get angry at you? You couldn't be around Bill Clinton very long without seeing him get angry. I think everybody who worked with him saw him get angry at one time or another. Watching Bill Clinton erupt is like watching Mt. Vesuvius. It is something to behold. He gets very red in the face and it goes very quick and it leaves. And he does not harbor anger. It's a way to sort of get it out of his system. But I don't think it's necessarily a healthy thing. I mean I think he sort of vents. One of the reasons I came to respect George Stephanopoulos was that frequently the president vented right into George's face. It was like he'd just be right close and just really red in the face. It was almost as if George was the son he'd never had. And George was very stoic about it. He knew it would pass. And he didn't fight. He didn't try to do anything. He just tried to calm him down and I think he helped him in that regard. But it was an anger that was something to behold. It was not something I would recommend as a model. I tell you what, it's important for a president to set standards for his staff, so they gain admiration for who he is and what he stands for and they begin acting the way he acts. And so, what you find in our best presidents is the staffs get very much shaped by the atmosphere in the White House and the way the staff behave begins to take on the coloration of the person in the center. And if you've got a president who sort of is a little erratic, you know, he's very bright, but he's not as steady, the staff can get very erratic. One of the things Bill Clinton did that I find most unfortunate, was he lied to his own staff about things during the campaign. He lied about Gennifer Flowers, he lied about the draft. And once you start down that road, what you find is "Well, if he's going to do it, maybe that's standard operating procedure around here." And he wasn't-- Was it? Did you find that in the White House? Did you find people were lying? I think that the vast majority of people who worked with Bill Clinton and have worked in the Clinton administration are honest, up, straightforward people. I think there have been some people around him, a few, who have been willing to engage in a lot of things that are just unethical. I don't think there's any doubt about that. I don't think you can look at the record over the last seven years and say there hasn't been a pattern of unethical activity. Now, it has not amounted to an assault on the Constitution of the kind that we saw in the Nixon Administration. I was there in the Nixon Administration. The violations of law, the abuses of power were much more serious but one can't look at what happened in the Clinton administration and say this has been a good record. It has not been the most ethical administration in history, I'm sorry to say. And I think that some of this starts at the top. I really think it's important for a president to set standards and say, you know, "This is the way we're going to be. This is the way I'm going to be and the way I expect you to be and if you're not, if you don't behave yourself, you're out of here." I think it's really important for a president to do that. Our best presidents have done that. And you know, the coloration of the person in the center does matter a great deal. And I think Bill Clinton has done some fantastic things for the country. In many ways he's had a lot of accomplishment, but there have been some downsides. And you just can't walk away from them and say, it's been all perfect. It hasn't been. One of the trademarks has been a tendency to sort of lurch from crisis to crisis to go up to the brink and pull back. And whether it's legislative fights or the draft or Gennifer Flowers, there's always been a crisis, where doom is right around the corner and yet, Clinton pulls out of it. Is there something about who Bill Clinton is that leads to that kind of lurching from crisis to crisis? That's a good question. There is a part of him, because he's so bright, that becomes easily bored. And I think he enjoys to some extent seeing how close he can walk to the edge of the envelope and still pull it off and still, you know, walk right on the edge. And his problem has been as president, occasionally he's fallen off. But there's a part of him that sort of likes to dare history, because he's always been so good and people have always been able to say, "Wow, he did that." I think it's sort of one of the things he enjoys doing. He likes to get the ball on his own two-yard line and see if he can score a 98-yard run. He just enjoys that. And it's part of his psyche. And so, I think he's willing to accept a certain amount of chaos or a certain amount of lateness on things and try to pull it out. It's like the guy who doesn't study until the night before the exam and then reads five books and goes and gets an A. I mean, that's been his history in life, right? So he brings that to governing. And he's always succeeded in life doing that. The presidency is a very, very difficult institution. It's very difficult to govern this country. It takes a lot of discipline and a lot of thought about where you're going. And if you lurch around what happens is that you frequently get some things done, but it leaves the rest of the community saying, what's going on here? Forty years ago Richard Neustadt published a book about presidential power that's now the classic in the field. And he made the observation that you have to have two things going for you. You have to have public prestige and a professional reputation. Now, Bill Clinton has been very good at the public prestige. He's been very, very good at the outside game of politics. Better than almost anybody we've seen recently. He's had a much, much harder time on the professional reputation. Professional reputation is how people feel about you on Capitol Hill, how people feel about you in the press, how people feel about you in Georgetown, and some other places around Washington, increasingly it's how people feel about you in New York and in Silicon Valley and in Redmond and in places like that. And his professional reputation has been one of "We're not sure who he is. And we're not sure he'll be there for us in the end." And there's been a lot of distrust up on Capitol Hill and I think that's come back to haunt him. I mean I think he's been much more popular in the country than he is in other power centers. And that makes a difference in governing.