A political strategist who advised Clinton on and off since 1978, he devised the 'triangulation' policy that helped the president win reelection in 1996. Clinton initially hid Morris's role from his White House staff, referring to him by the code name "Charlie." He is the author of a 1998 book on his White House experience: Behind the Oval Office: Getting Reelected Against All Odds. Interview conducted June, 2000 by Chris Bury The '92 campaign. Can you talk about an example of when you were consulted during that? ...He was asking for advice about New Hampshire. And he said that Flowers had not really hurt him, the revelation of his relationship with Gennifer Flowers. But the draft was sending him into free-fall, the allegation of draft dodging, and he said, "How should I handle it?" And I said, "Ignore it. Go back to your issues. Go back to what brung you. Go back to the 'New Democrat' approach, the 'End Welfare As We Know It', all of the issues that really made it possible for you to win what some people have called the intellectual primary of 1992. And remind them as to why you're there." And I said, "That can give you a strong second place, a come-back second place, which I think will carry you on to very good shape for the Southern primaries on Super Tuesday." And he said, "You mean I shouldn't answer?" And I said, "Right." And he said, "But in our work together, you always say, 'Answer, answer, answer'." And I say, "This is one time when you shouldn't answer. You should avoid it. And you can talk about it in free media if you have to, but your ads should be concentrating on the theme of what you're going to do that really is going to move this country forward and going to articulate new solutions to these issues. That's why they're voting for you in the first place. You'll never convince them you didn't dodge the draft, and you'll never convince them you didn't go with Gennifer Flowers. But you can convince them that despite that, you can reform welfare." Later on during the campaign, there is much consternation about a vice presidential candidate, the traditional factors are geographical balance, electoral map, and so on. Gore was quite different--fellow border state, southerner. Right. I think that the reason Clinton chose Gore was that he was an example of what Clinton was like. He was kind of almost like the yellow magic marker that you use to highlight the text so that you can really remember what are the most salient features of it. He wanted to choose someone who was a metaphor for himself: who was his age, who was from a nearby state, who was also a moderate Democrat, concerned about the environment. And he wanted to choose someone next to whom his own virtues would be highlighted, almost the way you choose the backdrop on a set. If you have blue eyes, you want a blue backdrop so your eyes stand out. He was kind of using Gore almost as sort of the backdrop for his candidacy. What was your advice? Well, I felt that he should choose Gore. I thought it was a very good choice. The thing that also influenced him in his choice of Gore is that at the time he was reading a wonderful book called Generations, by Howe and Strauss, which was written in 1991, which talks about American history in terms of generational cycles. And he and I had actually, coincidentally, both read the book, and we talked about it. And his whole point was that in the book Generations it says that the G.I. generation, the World War II generation, will control the American presidency; and there will never be a president from the "Silent Generation," the generation that came of age in the '50s; and that it will skip to the "Boomer" generation that came of age in the '60s. And that was true, it turned out. George Bush, Sr., was the last G.I. president. And Dukakis, Mondale, McGovern, all of them "Silent Generation" candidates, did not get elected president. And it skipped over to the "Boomer" generation, which was Bill Clinton. And he wanted to choose a fellow "Baby Boomer," to make that point, to tap into that generations consciousness, and to really inspire it to support him. And Gore I think was a very good choice for doing that. And I think that's really why he chose Gore. Fast-forward to September 1994. You've been out of touch with Clinton for some time. You're campaigning up in Connecticut, I believe, and the phone rings. Well, I had had occasional contact with Clinton. I'd met with him three or four times a year during '93 and '94. But increasingly, he was not following the advice I was giving him. He was going off in a direction of working only with the Democrats. And so we kind of fell out of touch. We didn't have a lot to do with each other. And the phone rang, and they say, "It's the President of the United States on the phone." And I at the moment was working on a congressional race in Connecticut, figuring out how the Wilton, Connecticut town committee would vote on this guy's nomination for Congress. And it was like I was being levitated out of this, and lifted up to a cloud, that the president called. And I had to, in those moments before he comes on the line, reconstruct in my own mind the sort of exercise you have to go through before you talk to Bill Clinton. Because he's very smart, and he's very sharp, and he's very quick--and no preliminaries. So you gird up for it. And then he gets on. And right away he said, "What do you think I should do about Haiti?" And I said, "Why? What are you planning to do?" And he said, "Well, we're thinking of the possibility of an invasion." And I realized--I remembered again that when you talk to Clinton in the first 30 seconds you have to oppose what he's saying. Because if all you say is "Good idea," he's never going to call you back, because he doesn't figure he needs your advice. So I said, "You're invading the wrong damn island." I'm meaning Cuba [laughs]. And I said, "You know, the two most important forces in American politics are racism and isolationism. And if you incur casualties in Haiti, you'll be offending both of those." And that was kind of a perspective he hadn't had before. And you have to do that with Clinton. You have to sort of shoot it across his bow, so that he stops, backs up, and then looks at it and takes another look at the facts. And then we had a nice 20-minute conversation about it--and all of a sudden, I was back. And I cannot describe to you the magical feeling that you have then. It's like all of the sudden there's an aura of stardust around you, and you're no longer a mortal human being. And I hung up the phone, and I had a lot of difficulty figuring out about the Wilton town committee after that phone call. At what point do you get taken into Clinton's confidence, in terms of what's happening politically in the fall of '94? Well, in the early days of October '94, he called me and said, "What do you think I should do about the congressional elections?" And I said, "Well, let me take a poll, and give you some advice." Because that's how I usually do it. So I took a survey with him. And I remember we were preparing the questionnaire, and he's on the phone with me. I figured that the President of the United States wouldn't have much time to fool with the questionnaire. No, he spent an hour and a half on the phone with me, going over each word of each question: "Make sure you ask about this accomplishment," "Make sure you ask about that accomplishment," "No, no, you have here that I created three million jobs; it's really three and a half million jobs." And he's all over that. So I did the poll, and I found something very interesting. I found that nobody believed in the big achievements of his: Nobody believed that he was reducing the deficit; nobody believed he was reducing crime; nobody believed he was creating jobs; nobody believed he was lowering unemployment. But they did believe the small achievements: They believed he'd lowered the student loan interest rate; they believed that he had succeeded in the Family and Medical Leave Law; that he'd made good appointments to the Supreme Court; that he'd expanded and saved the school lunch program. The small achievements. So I had a conference call with him and Hillary. And I said, "Stop trying to sell the big achievements. Sell the small ones. They'll believe those, and that's enough to move votes in your direction." And he kept saying, "No, but if I tell them all the jobs I've created, I tell them all the stuff I've done--" And I said, "Stop trying to get elected for the right reasons. Just try to get elected." And then Hillary joined in the chorus and said, "Bill, all you're doing is just trying to give them the big achievements. You're trying to justify yourself to history. Focus on the election. Focus on these voters." And then, he didn't follow the advice. And he called me a week before the election, and he said, "How do you think it's going to come out?" And I said, "You're going to lose the House and the Senate." And he said, "The House and the Senate? The Senate I can understand, but the House? No way I'm going to lose the House." And I said, "Well, I think you'll lose the Senate by six seats, and you'll lose the House by 20." He said, "Twenty seats in the House? You're crazy." And I said, "Well, just in case what you say isn't going to happen happens, can I send you a speech as to what to say at that point?" And he said, "Okay." And then, the next thing, he was giving it, after he'd lost both houses. In that fall campaign, the Republicans did a very effective job with their spots of morphing Democratic candidates into Clinton. And the taste that was in a lot of the public's mind at that point was based on things like gays in the military, the appointment debacle at attorney general. And Clinton had a perception of not only being part of an administration that was screwing things up, but that he was much more liberal than the electorate had known or expected. You have to realize why Clinton came across as a liberal in the first two years. The thing that dominated his thinking as he was taking office in late '92, was the fear of being another Jimmy Carter, of being a Democratic president who was ineffectual because Congress didn't support him. And he was scared to death of that. So he met with the House and the Senate Democratic leadership. And they basically said, "Listen, we'll play ball with you, we'll protect you, we'll do whatever you want. You just have to govern within our caucus. Don't govern in the whole House or the whole Senate. Work with our caucus, with the Democrats in the House and the Democrats in the Senate. And when you get their support, go with it. And let's forget the Republican Party exists. We'll just pass these bills on our own. We have the majority." And he was relieved. And this is a guy who's a scrambler normally, to use a football metaphor: He's used to going all over the field; being left, right, center; moving around; targets of opportunity; avoiding the blitz. And instead, he became a "pocket quarterback": "Just sit there behind this big offensive line of these Democratic politicians, and just throw the football, and we'll protect you." When we talked about that, I advised him against that. I said, "They will become your jailers. You won't be their candidate; you'll be their hostage. And you'll be spending every waking moment going around the liberal, Black, Hispanic caucuses, handing out goodies to try to round up the last Democratic vote, because you need them all to defeat the Republicans. Whereas, if you play it in the center, you'll get a good many Republican votes, and you'll be able to pass your bills." Then, the Constitution of the United States was amended--secretly. Nobody understood it. You needed 60 votes to pass a law in the Senate, not 50. The Constitution says 51, a majority. But as a practical matter, the filibuster, which had previously been used only occasionally in the civil rights era, throughout the '80s became used more and more and more, until ultimately it became de rigueur, it became habitual. In fact, there usually wasn't even a filibuster. There was just the threat of one, and if you didn't have 60 votes you wouldn't bring the bill up on the Senate floor. And while he had 55 or 56 Democrats, he didn't have 60. And as a result, the caucus method of governing broke down, and that accounted for a lot of the failures of his first term. If I could go back to the '94 election for a second-- One of the big reasons that I think Clinton lost the House and the Senate in '94 was that a week before the election he zigged when he should have zagged. He went to the Middle East two and a half weeks before election day. And he negotiated a peace accord. And his popularity was very high at that point. It jumped about ten points. And when he came back to the United States--Democrats were winning most of those races that they ultimately lost. And he called me and he said, "What do you think I should do?" And I say, "I think you should go back to the Middle East," meaning, "I think you should stay as president, stay out of this political stuff, don't campaign for anybody, keep your image up there. And that'll help your candidates win." And he said, "I can't do that, Dick. These people have voted for me with their careers on the line. They face tough races. They used to be afraid of my endorsement, but now I'm popular enough I can go into those districts and help those people." And I said, "Any district you go into, you'll be hurting the candidate you're campaigning for. Because you'll be lowering your image, which, while it'll help them in the moment that you're there, it'll depress their vote total." And he said, "No. Can't follow your advice. I have to go do that." And then after that, that's when I predicted he would lose both houses. Had he not campaigned in that last week, his approval ratings would have been ten points higher on election day, like they were a week before election day, and he probably would have kept the House. After the election, you were taken into the fold, but you have to use a code name, because Bill Clinton wants to keep your involvement a secret. Why the secrecy? And tell us why you came to use that name? Well, back then I was not at all known publicly. In fact, all the biographies that had been written about Clinton and Arkansas didn't mention my name. I'd been very much below the radar screen. And we both liked it that way. And I had become more of a Republican than a Democrat in the early 1990s. And in fact, all of my clients at that point were Republicans: Bill Weld in Massachusetts, Trent Lott in Mississippi, Tom Ridge in Pennsylvania. And I had a very thriving career as a consultant on the Republican side. Then the Democratic president, their persona non grata, calls me and says, "I'd like you to help me win this election, or help me stay in power." Now, when a president calls, particularly someone you've known for 20 years, you don't say, "No." You drop whatever you're doing, and you come and you say, "Yes." It's the old American tradition of "Drop your plow and sign up." But he wasn't sure that I would work out, and I wasn't sure that I would work out, either. I didn't know if his staff would accept me. I didn't know if he was really going to follow the advice I was giving him. For two years he hadn't listened to a darn thing I'd said. I'd been advising against almost everything he'd done for two years, and he hadn't listened to any of it. And I wasn't going to go into a situation where he wasn't listening to me, I'd end my career with the Republicans, and I would be ineffectual with him. From his point of view, he had a liberal Democratic staff that disapproved of everything I would urge. And he wasn't about to announce me with great fanfare if I wasn't able to really make the grade and give him advice that was effective. So both of us were sort of having a trial marriage. And we both figured it was better for me to be involved secretly. So I made up a code name, "Charlie"--which, by the way, is the name of my favorite Republican political consultant, Charlie Black. And I just thought it was kind of funny that I'd use a Republican name, working for Clinton. And it was really weird. He would be in meetings with Panetta and his whole staff. And Betty Curry, his secretary, would come in and say, "Charlie's on the phone." And he would say, "Excuse me, that's a call I have to take." And he'd go out into the anteroom and talk to me. And he'd go back in. And they'd all be wondering, "Is this some head of state? Is this some CIA agent or something?" And they had no idea who it was. It was kind of funny. At some point, the staff realizes that something is going on. They're submitting drafts in the daytime, and the next morning these drafts are coming back with significant, even radical, changes. And the staff says, "Well, there's a day Clinton, and there's a night Clinton." What was going on in that period? Well, the most interesting and funny part of it was when he wrote the State of the Union speech of 1995. He didn't like the draft that he'd gotten, because it was more of a liberal draft than he wanted to give. And he asked me to come over to the White House residence. So I came over. And he said, "I'd like you to work with me on the State of the Union today." It was kind of an all-day thing. And he doesn't type. He doesn't know how to type. So the staff knows that he doesn't know how to type. So he didn't want me to type a draft into the White House computer, because then the staff would figure out that that wasn't his draft. So he hunted all throughout the residence for a manual or electric typewriter--you know, from the stone ages. And they found this dusty IBM Selectric. And the guy lugged it upstairs to his office and "Whew [blows]," blew off the dust. And then I sit there typing the draft of the speech. He's standing over me, kind of half-dictating, half saying, "Then I want to go here, I want to go there." And I tried to put into words, other words, what he was saying, or get his words. And then as we finished each page, he would take it into his other room, and he'd copy it over, left-handed, in longhand, so that he could give it to his staff and say, "This wasn't a speech writer's draft. This is my draft. I stayed up all night working on it." In fact, it was his draft. He was standing over me when I was typing it. I remember at one point I looked up to him and I said, "You know, this is what I've wanted to do since I'm eight years old," and he said, "Me, too." And then we worked on the draft and produced it. And then the next day, the story all over the White House was that the president had stayed up all night writing the speech on his own. And a couple of people suspected something was going on, but nobody really knew. How does it leak out, or how is it revealed, that in fact you are working for the president again? Well, in March, after I'd been doing this for four months, he felt that it was important for me to get in touch with the rest of his staff. Because what was happening was, I was urging one course of action, they were urging another, and there was no integration between them. And he just felt it was essential that that happen. So he introduced me to Harold Ickes, Deputy Chief of Staff; Leon Panetta, the Chief of Staff; and Erskine Bowles, the other Deputy Chief of Staff--not yet Stephanopoulos. And the three of them attended a meeting. And I was having these weekly strategy meetings with him. And I show up, and there are these three other guys there. And I said to myself, "This is the end of the secrecy." And then, in the course of the meeting I mentioned that I hoped to remain anonymous. And Harold Ickes says, "Well, the one thing I can guarantee you is you won't be anonymous." And sure enough, about a week later, Jane Mayer of The New Yorker magazine called me and said, "I understand you've been attending strategy meetings with the president every week. Can we talk about it?" And then I was outed.