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It's just a physical force. It's really not connected to anything in particular, and it's certainly not personal, but he gets up grumpy. And he starts slow, as it is, because he stays up quite late and would work quite late. And he wants to manage every single thing in the campaign. There's always going to be some bad news in the newspaper when you get up. So it's just his way of clearing his throat.

Whether it was a bad headline in the newspaper or a stupid scheduling decision, he would get it all out all at once in the suite over his Raisin Bran. And I never minded it, because it wasn't personal and it wasn't particularly mean. It was just ferocious. And it would just pass. He would have the outburst, and then go on and do his day and do brilliantly at it. Also, for a staffer, it's a kind of a source of power to be the one who gets the SMO. You're trusted enough, or you're important enough, to take the wrath and then try to fix it. Although, that all said, it was much easier when we did it over the phone rather than in person.

There is a problem with Clinton's image at roughly this point in the campaign. There is this real perception among many voters that he's this rich kid.

It's amazing. The qualities that work for him so well among elites in the party, with reporters, with the chattering establishment class that you need to convince to back your campaign so that you can go present yourself to the voters -- that he was a Rhodes scholar, Georgetown, lawyer, smart guy -- all worked against him later as he was being introduced to the rest of the country.

And what it did was actually reinforce people's doubts about his credibility. They didn't trust him in large measure because they thought he was this rich kid who had always had everything handed to him. And we found out was something quite simple and quite startling. If you simply gave people the information that Bill Clinton was the son of a single mom who worked his way through school, they could put the rest of his life in context. And they were much less concerned about their doubts, because they felt he had worked for everything he had gotten. And it was incredible.

After the primaries in California, you then set up the war room. What are you trying to do?

Not to be the Dukakis campaign, which a lot of us had worked in. And a lot of us felt we had been beat because the Republicans had laid out a pretty targeted, fierce assault on Dukakis that we didn't answer. We were determined that if we were going to lose, we were going to lose fighting. We were going down fighting. In June, we were in third place, broke and we hadn't gotten paid in two months. And Ross Perot was moving. And like I said, we were not going to go down without a fight.

And the war room was important, not just for the actual work it would do in answering the Republican charges and counterattacking, but the very idea of it was important -- just having a war room so that Democrats, especially, but also others who were just going to start to pay attention to the campaign, would see that we weren't like Democrats in the past. They'd see that we were different -- not only because we were different on our ideas -- but because we fight back when we're hit.

Later in the fall, polls were looking pretty good for you with Bush. Still, according to everything everyone had written, there's a sense of fear that never goes away.

It's a different kind of fear. I remember the first time I ever really let myself believe we could win and we're going to win. It was late September in the Washington Hilton on a Sunday morning, and Clinton was about to go give a speech in North Carolina on NAFTA. And he called me in and had his standard morning outburst on the speech and was yelling about it. And, but his heart wasn't really in it, and I could tell. . . . And he suddenly stops yelling, looks me right in the eye and says, "You think we're going to win, don't you?" I said, "Yes." And he goes, "I do, too." And for me, that was just incredible. He was saying out loud what we all hoped for, but could never say. It would be like talking about a no-hitter in the eighth inning.

And from that moment on, inside we didn't feel like underdogs anymore. We felt like we had this responsibility to win. And as a staffer, it was starting to get a little bit out of control, because I had never been through anything like that and nobody else had either. When you're in a presidential campaign at its peak in the fall, all the sudden it's not just 20 people in Little Rock sitting in a room. You're representing a lot of people who have invested in you, and not just the money. People have just invested their hopes. The whole country is paying attention. There are millions. And we start to think, my God, if we blow it now, it's all our fault. And we will have blown this opportunity that a lot of people are counting on us to carry out.

So the fear of making a mistake and letting these people down and thinking, basically, that you're going to have to leave the country becomes tremendous. You just don't want to blow it.

One thing that was so critical here -- and it starts in New Hampshire -- is this man's skill at campaigning.

Awesome.

Had you ever seen anything like that before?

Never. We called him "Secretariat" because he was just the absolute thoroughbred of thoroughbreds of campaigners. Whether it was working a rope line or giving a speech or devising the policy or just having the stamina to last through four 20-hour campaign days in a row and do it with good humor and grace. None of us had ever seen anything like this before. He is the politician probably not only of his generation, but if you're thinking just pure raw political skills, he's probably the politician of the century. And it was an awesome sight to watch.

On the one hand, you have this thoroughbred. On the other hand, you had a candidate who, you realized fairly early on, could also be your worst enemy.

Every campaign thinks their candidate is their worst enemy at some point or another. Because as skilled and smart as he was, he would always take it that extra mile. If something was a little bit off or a little bit untrue, and you never knew either what he would say or when something else from his past would come back and bite you. And so we always had that fear on top of everything else.

One of the greatest anxieties -- even though we didn't really believe it -- in the final month of the campaign, there was all this talk going around Republican circles that Clinton had written some letter when he was at Oxford to some official in Sweden saying he was going to renounce his citizenship. On its face, it was crazy. We didn't really believe it. But after everything we'd been through, we couldn't be sure. And you never know, are you going to wake up one morning and son of a gun, there's that letter. And then what do you do?

In that last hectic few hours before the election in November, the governor and Mrs. Clinton are sitting there at the plane and talking to Ted [Koppel]. And one of the things that Ted asks is, "Are you going to have a zone of privacy in the White House?" And Mrs. Clinton was just adamant and confident that not only is she going to have a zone of privacy, but she's going to do everything she can to have a normal life. As you're about to win a presidential election, is it naive to think that a zone of privacy that exists?

It's hard to think back to that time. A little naive, a little arrogant, and a little sad; because it is naive to believe it; it's arrogant to try to put it into place; and it's sad that it shouldn't be. The president should have a zone of privacy. It's crazy, given what we had been through, to believe that it was going to happen. And it was wrong to try to like push it too hard.

Do you remember your first conversation with the new president-elect?

I remember a couple. I remember that evening I was sitting in my office back in Little Rock, and it was strange. It was just like the beginning. From the minute I met him, it was it wasn't like it was ever an interview. It was just like we were working together. The same thing on election night. I couldn't even find a moment to thank him or say what an amazing experience this had been or to congratulate him, because we're spending all the time on the phone going over the results in the far western states. He's fighting with me about whether or not he's ahead or behind in Nevada. And I'm thinking, "My God, you're the next President of the United States."

But the next day was really the nice moment. Late in the day, everybody had slept in, and the Clintons were having all their staff come one by one to the little den off the kitchen in the governor's mansion where we had spent hours and hours and hours writing commercials, plotting strategy, whatever. And I remember going into the den. It was late afternoon. It was already getting dark outside. And they both walk into the room, again, a little washed out, tired, obviously incredibly content. And it was just like a three-way hug. And Clinton congratulated me. He called me a "master of the universe." Which is how I knew that Joe Klein had written Primary Colors two years later -- when that phrase showed up.

But it was just everything you could possibly hope in a moment like that. The combination of this intimate, close celebration combined with all of the anticipation of having a once-in-a-lifetime chance to help bring your ideas to the rest of the country. And it was amazingly powerful. The only thing they said about the job was, "We just want you to keep on doing what you're doing," which was all I wanted to hear.

Almost immediately you had this young, committed, but inexperienced campaign staff putting together the next government, and the transition in Little Rock. What stands out in your mind about the transition? Are you sitting around and he's picking the cabinet?

That's not exactly true, though. The cabinet was being done in a different, quite closed process. What stands out now is that we didn't know what we didn't know at the time. We thought we could get away with just carrying on the work of the campaign for another month or two. . . . It turned out to be a miscalculation, because what we didn't realize deeply enough is that, despite all this fiction about a transition, at least metaphorically, the day after the election this guy is president and will be treated as if he is in many, many respects. And we weren't ready for it. The single biggest mistake we probably made was not appointing a White House chief of staff and at least a core staff that day, so we could act as if we were ready.

Were you in over your head? The staff that had been so successful in electing the president when it came to the first acts of the government?

To the extent that we were, we believed our victory too much, and didn't internalize enough what a narrow victory it was. Everybody is in over their heads when they start, yes. And I think we were at some level. But our mistake was not that everybody should have been thrown away. But there should have been more of an experienced structure around us. I like to think that, even if we made our mistakes, a lot of talented people from the campaign are still working for the president or are essential to his success. But we also needed to have a greater respect and greater supervision from some people who had been there before.

But there was resentment, was there not, of the idea that you needed graybeards?

Yes. We won. We showed them how to do it. We did it our way. We're going to govern our way, too. That's dumb. Yes. That's dumb, and it's natural.

You didn't want the Washington insiders who had worked in the Carter administration in the transition?

No, we did not. No. And that was a mistake. I mean, it depends on who you're talking about, but sure. We won it our way. We wanted to govern our way. And we got beat back our way.

Did the transition set the tone for the first couple of weeks in the sense of a transition that's widely been described as disorganized, and not having a strong command structure? Did that lead to some of the missteps your first week or so?

There were an awful lot of successes in the transition, too. The economic conference was one. But, sure, the first press conference two days after Clinton gets elected, he gets a question on gays in the military, and answers it. It gets widely reported and that defines the first few weeks of the administration. There were a lot of reasons for that. In part, I think that there was kind of a bias to highlight this issue that we didn't fully appreciate at the time. And I think it was also a problem for us because we had no center. We were getting buffeted by a lot of different forces on that issue, by our own gay supporters on the one hand, by our supporters on the right in the military within the party, on the other, by the press. And we had no real good way to coordinate it all.

What do you remember about watching the president get sworn in at the inauguration?

I just can't believe it. I just can't believe it. And no matter what else happens from here, it's just amazing. It's funny. So much of it is a blur, because it was this combination. You had all the pomp of the inaugural and the real sense that you are a part of history in a way that can never be replicated. At the same time, we're worried about gays in the military, Zoe Baird and whether he's going to get the speech on time. And it's almost as if that moment when he was actually sworn in was a moment out of time -- completely separate from everything else that was happening.

Zoe Baird developed partly because there was an understanding that the attorney general post is going to go to a woman. And what happens there? Why did Zoe Baird become such an early problem?

We misread the signals. In part, we didn't think it was going to be a problem because the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Orrin Hatch, said it wasn't. So what looked like a kind of an understandable accounting mix-up with Zoe Baird's household help didn't seem to be that big a problem in the little vetting that we had done.

But it got picked up on talk radio and the message was crystallized. It was a very clear message. We're about to appoint an attorney general who broke the law, who hired illegal aliens and didn't pay the taxes on them. And when it's crystallized into that sound bite, we all learned on the campaign that it was an impossible message to ignore or defeat. And it just overwhelmed us. And I think what it tied into more deeply or as deeply was that this crowd that is coming in is kind of an elite crowd who have a sense of entitlement. They're allowed to live by one set of rules, and everybody else has to live by another. And I think that's where the real political power came from.

Because that's the way some people felt about Clinton himself?

That's the way some people think about politicians themselves. It's the way a lot of older voters think about the baby-boomer generation in particular. It's the way some people think about elites from Harvard, Yale, Georgetown, and Oxford. So it all tied together.

When Zoe Baird pulls out, or was asked to leave, you go in front of cameras, and you have a pretty rough time.

Actually, it was worse than that. It was before I had to do my first briefing, as she's testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, refusing to leave, and I was under pretty strict instructions. In fact, I had been at a meeting in the Oval Office before my briefing, and this was my first briefing the day after the inaugural. I was suppose to defend her as best I could, but leave the president room to cut her loose. You try walking that line in your first press conference. I didn't do very well at it.

You got hammered.

Oh, I got killed. And they were mad about a lot of different things. They were upset because we had closed off the upper pressroom. They were having fun with gays in the military and Zoe Baird was fighting for her life, unsuccessfully, on Capitol Hill. People knew that she was going to be gone and knew that I couldn't say so, and knew that it was going to be great fun to watch me squirm. And I guess it was. And I knew also that I was doing my best. I was trying to say that the president thinks that she would do a good job as attorney general.

And now, I'm blanking. I forgot what the question was. I just knew that. . . the minute I said "now," they could tell that I had dumped her. And I just don't remember what the question was. Oh, well.

You said that there was some real resentment. You had decided to close off the door to your office, which had traditionally been open for the press.

Hillary had decided. I shouldn't say it that way, because we all backed it up. We thought we were just going to show the press who's boss. And there had been a lot of different ideas starting out in the transition, and it goes to what you were talking about -- the zone of privacy.

. . . I remember hearing at the time that when Hillary had met with Barbara Bush, Mrs. Bush had kind of encouraged this, "Show the press who's boss" mentality. And I'm thinking, that's easy for her to say, she's not going to have to live with it. I think it was sincere, but it was also going to create incredible repercussions. Now, part of the fallback position was to at least not allow the press to just simply come up into the upper floors of the West Wing whenever they wanted to. This was a pure example of arrogance and inexperience and naivete all mixed together.

You say it was Hillary Clinton's idea?

She was pushing for it, yes. And we didn't fight back hard enough. I think it was partly to create this zone of privacy. They wanted to have a White House where people felt that the officials felt that they could walk around freely and share their ideas. We were insufficiently sensitive to the signal it would send -- the symbolism of shutting out the press -- and how enraged the working reporters would be, and how oblivious it was to the traditions of the White House.

You say it was because of the sense of privacy. Was it also because there was a lot of lingering resentment about how the Clintons had been treated by the press during the campaign?

That their privacy had been intruded? I think part of it was this notion that the only way to protect your privacy is to do it yourself. And, again, there's this underlying sense of "We're going to show them who's boss. We're in control now. We got elected, not them. We got elected, in part, by beating back this over intrusiveness of the press. It's what the people are calling for and we're going to carry it out." That's all subconscious. It's never really spoken like that, but it's the feeling animating the decision.

Do you remember what was said at the time?

No, it didn't come up that much. It was more where I'd blame myself and others on the communication staff, had we been smarter, more experienced, and more sensitive ourselves, we would have realized that this was a place where we should really fight back hard and say, this is just too important. And had we done that, I have no doubt that we would have prevailed. And it was a mistake not to.

The subject of gays in the military came up during the transition, when the governor was asked about it at a press conference. How does the White House staff let that turn into such a catastrophe?

It wasn't by choice. We didn't have this plan to go out and impose gays in the military on day one of the Clinton White House. I don't remember the slogan of the 1992 Clinton campaign being "gays in the military." It's stupid.

What happened was, like you say, we just lost control of it. There had been a court case that Clinton got asked about immediately after Election Day. I blame our own inexperience. I blame the press's hunger for a conflict, and a lot of the president's opponents who were willing to, one, see the benefit of making this issue number one; and two, some of his friends, who didn't understand how much harm it was going to do to their cause.

In hindsight, there was no way to fix this problem quickly. Had we been able to, obviously, the best solution would have been to come up immediately with some sort of a six-month or yearlong study period. Sam Nunn didn't want do it. He was probably a little bit upset about not being named secretary of state. And he didn't have sincere beliefs about the issue. The joint chiefs were locked in concrete against any change. And the president's supporters in the gay community didn't fully understand how counterproductive it would be to hit this issue so quickly. And it was a miscalculation on all sides.

When the president announces the compromise, he doesn't look terribly comfortable. He doesn't look terribly strong. He's announcing a compromise that he doesn't seem to be very happy about.

Why would he be? It didn't make anybody happy. We had lost the first week of the White House to an issue that most of the country looked up and said, "What are these people doing? They got elected to fix the economy and nobody heard a thing about the economy." And it probably cost him ten points in the polls, the opposition of the joint chiefs of staff, and handed a campaign issue to his future opponent. You wouldn't be too comfortable talking about it, either.

What did he tell you?

I don't know of any one conversation. Our overwhelming feeling when the compromise was finally announced was relief. We can finally get on to other things.

Did you have to fight a sense in Washington that you guys could be rolled easily? That the president gets into trouble with Zoe Baird because he's trying to accommodate a constituency, he gets in trouble with gays in the military because he's rolling to a campaign promise. Was there an early sense of, "Look, the helpmates are pushovers?"

On the one hand. On the other hand, they also thought we were fighting for things that were stupid to be fighting over. It's easy to say, "Oh, these guys are pushovers." On the other hand this, there's this facile idea that "Oh, Clinton should have just signed an executive order ordering the joint chiefs to allow gays in the military, and that would have shown them." Who are they kidding? It would have been overturned by 415-20 in the House the next day and about 95-5 in the Senate. You wouldn't have shown any backbone at all getting beat that badly.

But yes, the situation was developing there quite quickly. And, in part, also because a lot of our negotiations over just putting together the budget plan were seen to be carrying out in public. On top of that, "Oh, we can't do the middle-class tax cut like we had hoped." So it seemed to be an awful lot of concessions early on in the administration -- wise ones, it would turn out over time -- but they didn't look that way then.

What was the White House staff operation like in terms of setting policy, in terms of what the meetings were like, in terms of people who had access to the president, in terms of how long the meetings ran and in terms of how the president's time was used?

The ones that stick out from those early days are putting together the economic plan. And to this day, I still have very mixed feelings about them. And it has become easy to caricature, these all-night bull sessions that are like college seminars, and undisciplined staff who are running around like a bunch of kids after a soccer ball, all going to the ball at the same time. It's easy to caricature.

On the other hand, one of the other strong feelings I remember is thinking, "Boy, in some ways, this is the way it should be." Not the all-night nature, but the serious discussion of the earned income tax credit and agriculture policy, and what is the right and best use of our education dollars. I still also believe that we were going about things intellectually in a very serious way. We were blind to the importance of structure, and actually, we didn't have enough deep-in-your-bones respect for the office itself. So we didn't realize that there's something important about going about the work of the White House in a more formal way, even if it feels a little stilted at the time.