He was White House Press Secretary during Clinton's impeachment trial, and held the post from October 1998, when Mike McCurry resigned, until October 2000. Interview conducted October, 2000 by Chris Bury The first time you met Bill Clinton, what were your impressions? The first time I met Bill Clinton was November or December of 1995. I had been called by someone at the White House to come over and consider taking the campaign press secretary job. And I remember going into the Oval Office, and they sat me down. The president wasn't there. It was quite nerve-wracking. And he walked in, said hello, and basically said, "So you want to be the press secretary?" And I said, "Yeah, I think so." And then we talked. For the next 30 minutes, he gave me the sharpest, clearest sense of what the campaign was about and what he expected the campaign press secretary to do, showing that he'd thought the entire thing through and that other people had made him comfortable with me, so it wasn't really an interview. He just wanted to make sure that I understood what he expected, and at the end said, "What do you think?" And I said, "Well, sounds good to me." You know, you're in the Oval Office. What else are you going to say? Was it clear then that the job he expected you to do? That you were to be an advocate-- Sure. I mean, this was the campaign job. There was no question that as the campaign press secretary, your job was to be political and to advocate on behalf of the president politically. And, you know, he had some ideas. Some were interesting, some were dispensable, about how we were going to run the campaign. None of the information was remarkable in and of itself. It was kind of remarkable that he had thought it through and knew what he wanted, and just wanted to make sure that I had the same sense that he did. The interesting thing was I went from there and talked to the vice president, who did what was like a job interview. He asked me a bunch of questions about, my background and what I thought. And so I kind of walked away thinking that I'd gotten sort of a history lesson from the president and a job interview from the vice president. After the campaign you joined the White House staff as a deputy press secretary [and] in 1997, there was a historic Supreme Court decision. The Court ruled nine to nothing that the Paula Jones case could continue. Do you recall the president's reaction to that? Was the president surprised by that decision? Was there much discussion about it? What I remember about that is I think that the president was in Europe at the time and I was back in Washington. So I called over and got McCurry, or somebody who was with the traveling party, and said, "You guys are about to get hit with this." So I don't have a contemporaneous personal account. I think judging from conversations, though over time later, I don't think the president was particularly surprised. I think he viewed these decisions not necessarily being drawn strictly on constitutional grounds, and I don't think that he ever went into any case where his personal attorneys or the White House counsel's office where he had any degree of confidence despite whatever merits or lack of merits existed. One of the arguments in that case was that a president should be subject to civil suits because there was no extraordinary drain on his time. You know, the interesting thing about this is, it in some ways reflects the complexity of the president, because on one level it's an absurd argument, with hindsight. The Supreme Court, nine of the smartest people in this country, could not have gotten it more wrong. And one would hope that if they had this to do over again, they would make a different decision, because obviously it on one level put the kind of burden we shouldn't be putting on a president when it comes to a civil suit; but on another level, his abilities are extraordinary to perform well on a number of different levels simultaneously. So if you're asking me did it negatively impact his ability to govern, my answer is no. Was it a pain in the ass? Sure. Did it bother him a lot? Sure. But did the country suffer because of the time it took away from him? No. You say that they couldn't have gotten it more wrong. What do you mean? Well, they argued that somehow the president didn't have any special responsibility that would keep him from presenting a credible defense for himself. And, unless working 24 hours a day for the country seven days a week isn't a special responsibility, I think they're wrong. But as I said, nothing's simple, nothing's straightforward, because I'm also making the argument that he was able to do both. And I think that's something peculiar to him. I think if we look into the future at some of the people who think they may want to be president or may well be president, I'm not sure they have the ability to do those things. So, maybe they were right on one level. They were certainly wrong on one level. January of '98, the Lewinsky story breaks. What was the president's initial reaction? Well, that was an interesting day, obviously. That's probably an understatement. But it's the one day that I can remember that I got to work late because my daughter had been sick and was up half the night sick, and then as these things always happen, once you sort of get them to bed, you get sick. So I ended up getting to bed about 7:00 in the morning and waking up at 10:00 and calling the office, and somewhat stupidly saying, "Anything going on?" And I found out that there was a few things going on. There was very little discussion that day--in fact, probably no discussion of the merits of the allegations or the story. Through a fluke of scheduling we had three interviews scheduled that day, as advancers to the State of the Union, with Jim Lehrer and NPR and Morton Kondracke. And my focus was to make sure he was ready for those interviews. So a very small group gathered in his private dining room. The interesting thing about it was is these are meetings getting the president ready for interviews that people used to fight to get into. On this day there was a very small group of people who showed up. There was no big fuss at the door. People wanted to stay away, they were wary-- Well, I think people knew this was going to be a pretty difficult session, and so there wasn't a big aggressive beating down the door to get in and show that you could brief the president. But it was a very direct session ... we went through what the likely questions would be. It was very clear that we were not going to get into expansive answers, and we spent most of the briefing--and this was probably foreshadowing the next couple years--discussing the potential State of the Union questions, the real policy questions, because we knew they were coming, too.. Did the president tell you how he was going to answer questions that day? I think that there had been some discussion with the lawyers of just how far you could go because of the ongoing investigation. So there really wasn't a long discussion. I remember we did a session between the first and the second one, because for some reason the press had picked up on the tense of the president's words in the first one. And I remember telling him that they somehow think because you're using the present tense that you are trying to slip, the past tense. So he corrected his tense in the next interview and was wary of that. But there wasn't a long discussion of the answer because the lawyers made clear that there was an ongoing investigation and we weren't going to litigate this in front of television cameras. They were going to do [it] with the independent counsel. Did you feel personally shaken on that day when you got up and heard the news? What was your feeling about it? Well, at this point in time we'd been through a lot of sensational stories that didn't pan out, you know, people who had to live through Whitewater... And I think at the end of the day we found out that there's not much going on there. We had all of campaign finance in 1997 where you would have thought the sky was falling. So it was a mixture of worry that this was something big and something important and a memory that, you know, things can seem pretty bad on Tuesday and be okay by Friday. So I don't know, I didn't think on that day our life was over. How did the president seem that day? I think that was the one thing which made this a little more serious. He was not quite as sure-footed as he normally was when there was some sensational story ... During this period at the White House in your dealings with Mr. Clinton, did you get the sense that he was isolated, lonely? Well, I would work with him anywhere between 8:00 in the morning and 10:00 at night, and he was never not surrounded by people. I can't speak to what happened when we all went home. But for the vast majority of that, he was not isolated. He was engaged. We had a lot of work to do. And to the extent that he was working through a serious problem, you get a rare glimpse of it. But it was not, you know, something you saw every day. Rare glimpse of what? Oh, just how serious and how this weighed on him. And it would come from anger with a story in the paper some week from somewhere appearing in the paper, or, you know, every once in a while, you'd get the sense that this did weigh on him. But, most of the time we all had jobs to do and I know that it's hard to believe from the outside--and no one has ever fully, I think, bought into this. But almost everybody didn't focus on this. Well, you in particular, because you had to deal with the press. Yeah. I was one of the few people--there was probably half a dozen to a dozen people who worked on this almost full-time. But that's out of many hundreds of people. And the people who were doing economic policy or health policy, they resented this because they were doing good work and weren't getting any attention, and you know, the way you get laws enacted is you get the public behind you, they support it, they pressure Congress, and nobody was paying attention. I mean, [domestic policy advisor] Gene Sperling could have stood on the White House roof taking his clothes off--people still wouldn't have trained a camera up there unless he yelled something about Monica. So I think they resented it, but they all just continued to go about their work. And the president ... most of the time of his day was filled up with a schedule that looked very much like his schedule in 1995 or 1993 but did not reflect that we had this saga ongoing. You were with the president in Africa when the Paula Jones suit was dismissed? What was the president's reaction? ...The president was obviously happy, obviously relieved, and obviously vindicated. You know, he felt all along that this was about politics and about money. I think we have ample evidence now that it was. And a judge had stood up and said that. Later that fall, the president goes before the grand jury. How was he on that day? How did he seem to you? I think he was ready. He had prepared for it. I think at the time that he went in, he was actually glad that he was going to do this and to get to put his side on the record. I think coming out of it he was angry with the way the independent counsel and his staff conducted the interview and the way they went about it. And I think that had something to do with the public statements he made afterwards. That day, the White House released photos, and there's a picture--I'm not sure what kind of a policy meeting it was, it must have been foreign affairs. But there's a picture of the president there with Sandy Berger and with Erskine Bowles, and he's got these terrible bags under his eyes, looked like he hadn't been sleeping. Well, you could probably make the case seven different times during the administration. The president is not one who gets more than five or six hours of sleep. But the days leading up to that he was doing double duty because we had some things going on in the world that were consuming a good bit of his time domestically and on the foreign front, plus he was using the odd hours very early in the day and late in the day to meet with David Kendall to prepare for the session. We've talked to the political people and we've talked to some of the legal team, and both sides there sort of acknowledge a conflict going on there. What was it like for you as press secretary when you have the political people who want to get one story out and you've got lawyers who are saying you really can't talk about this? There was conflict. That's a little overplayed, a little oversimplified in some of the accounts. And, you know, there were some people who had no time or sympathy for the lawyers' position. I was not one of those. I think I understood that the lawyers had a role to play that was different than the political or the communications people. As a group of people, we got along quite well, for people who had sort of been in this from the beginning, and it had winnowed down to--you only had the sort of people who really had to do this because there wasn't a lot of fun by the time we got to August and September. But there certainly were many days where a legal strategy came in direct conflict with a political strategy. There were certainly many days where the lawyers would write things that would make lawyers think "What a great lawyer" and would make political people roll over in their grave. Any examples of that? Oh, there was a filing that they had to put into--to the court I guess in response to the referral from Starr. And by all accounts it was a brilliant legal document, and I remember Paul Begala and I looking at it and neither one of us understood the first thing about it. And this was an example where we actually worked well together because we said to the lawyers, "I'm sure this is a great document, but the reporters are going to get through page 3 and give up. So would you mind if we wrote sort of a two-page summary to put on the top of it?" They said sure. So one of the filings, the first two pages were written by me and Paul. ...And, there were cases like that. I think a case where it didn't work was probably when we responded to the 81 questions. From the House-- Yeah, the 81 questions was a political act by members of the Republican Party in the House, and that was answered in a legal fashion. Now, they should have been answered in a legal fashion because most of them were trick questions. They were designed to cause legal harm to the president. That was all glossed over by those who reported on it at the time. But because this was over a Thanksgiving holiday, everybody had sort of scattered a little bit. So this sort of went up and the people who normally worried about how we were going to answer questions about it and talk about it were gone. And for those who wanted to create an excuse for impeachment, they used that. And in some sense we gave them one. I'm not sure that we could have changed much because these were not questions asked from any sort of genuine base. They were questions designed to either create legal peril for the president or create a sense that he was stonewalling. Actually, one of the most decisive discussions we had where there was a disagreement was the night before the Starr report came out, the referral. I and some of the political people were arguing that we couldn't wait to read the report and then write up a response because we'd be dead by the time the report was out. And the lawyers made the opposite argument, which was somewhat compelling, that you can't answer charges that haven't been made because what if they don't charge you with some of them, you'll look stupid. That conversation was fully engaged, and I'd say about 7 or 8 o'clock at night before the Starr report, we came to a decision, which was, we we knew what the case was. We'd read about it in the newspaper. They'd leaked everything out. So-- You were going to do a preemptive strike. We were going to do a preemptive strike. But that decision didn't get made until 8 o'clock the night before, so a large group of people stayed up all night. It ended up being a 50-60 page document, sort of rebutting but actually pre-butting the charges that we knew Starr was going to make. And that actually had a big impact that day on how it was seen, because everybody had seen the Starr charges because they'd been leaked. They'd been in the paper every day. They'd been on the evening news--wherever they came from. Because of the way we were playing this, we were not going out and doing the substance of the charges. We were just arguing this was all politics. So the day the Starr report came out, the only fresh piece of news was, wait a second, they have a defense! They're not just rolling over. So that was one where we argued about it for two days, but finally came to an agreement. And I think some of the lawyers were a little bit uncomfortable with engaging in this exercise, but they were all quite happy when they picked up the paper the next day. Did you ever have the sense around the fall of '98, September, October, that the president might have to resign? No, because I think from September of '98 this became fully a political debate, and I knew that we were going to win that debate. I didn't know how long it was going to take. I didn't know how painful it was going to be. But with the referral going up to the Hill, this now became about just raw politics. And I knew we could win a political debate. I wasn't sure during the investigator phase of this before the referral that that was a fight we could win, because, we were getting cut--you know, we could have died from a thousand cuts,two or three new ones each day with all the information that was flowing out of the investigation. But I think when it got to the Capitol, this became a political debate, not that much different from the budget debates we have from legislative debates, and it was on much firmer footing for us. Back up a little bit then, before it becomes a political debate. A member of the legal team has told us that he got a call from a very respected Democratic Senator, Conrad of North Dakota, and Senator Conrad warned him that the president was only a few days away from leading Democratic members of Congress paying him a visit saying "you have to go." I think saying we're a few days away I think overplays it a little bit, but there certainly was a sense during that summer that Democrats were worried about how this all played for them on the Hill, and it's understandable, and needed reassurance. And they were given reassurance, and needed to know that their voices were being heard within our team, and that was fixed. They were right when they argued that "Your lawyers aren't listening to us," and I think we fixed that problem. I don't think we ever got to the point where we felt like something was about to collapse on us, but I don't think anyone was naive enough to know that there wasn't a combination of three or four things that could happen in a fairly quick was that would cause intense pressure on Democrats. And, oddly enough, as is the case all the way through this thing, when things looked the worse, we were saved by the independent counsel. And I think Democrats were so offended by the political way that he referred the charges up to Congress and seemed to try to impose his will, that it became a rallying point in a political debate that played out, you know, that we now call impeachment. That summer, there was some legitimate concern within the White House that this could go in such a way that the president would have to leave? Listen, I don't think there was anybody who sat around and said, "You know, today this could be our last day here, this is falling apart" But I think everybody understood that this was a very serious and precarious position. And from a political point of view, Starr overplayed his hand at just the right time.