A few. Let me just do a little explanatory preamble to this. Even having spent eight years in Washington, the president and the first lady are constantly surprised at how Washington works. I think at one level they're going to be completely happy to get out of here. They don't understand the rules the way some old Washington hands do. And, I don't think they saw the big deal going out there early.

You know, it was a situation where it could do her some good because she had a big fundraiser planned for the Saturday night, and it was a chance for the president to go out and see a lot of his old friends. They don't all come together like this on many occasions.

And I remember arguing early on, because there was some talk that they would go out and spend six days there, and understanding the Washington rules somewhat better, made the argument that that's not a good idea because it'll be perceived as--exactly as you said--trying to steal the limelight. So, in fact, the trip got shortened a little bit, but probably not as much as it could have been.

But we play by a peculiar set of rules here, and the story came out in The New York Times the day we were leaving that was a very interesting story and was relevant and accurate if it had been run three weeks earlier. There was a debate between the first lady's campaign and the Gore campaign, and it was about fundraising. And because the first lady's fundraiser was going better than the Gores, and they were upset because there's only so many donors out there. And as is the case with most of the things that we do, it was worked out. The president made some calls for the people who were organizing the fundraisers. They got some more people to go there. They reshaped it a little bit.

So three weeks out, the problem that existed was settled. But then The New York Times decided to do a little bit of history and say that there was a raging debate going on. Trust me, if there was a raging debate, I would have been in the middle of it. And I wasn't. I had been in the middle of it three weeks before, but that doesn't matter.

Reality was now set. We had a new paradigm which was anytime Clinton stepped out anywhere near a camera, he was taking something away from Gore, and it didn't matter how you talked about it and what you did. The amazing thing about it is how little of it that we spent all of our time in the Beltway talking about translates to the country, because if we walked out and drove 30 miles in any direction and you asked--tell me about the president and the convention, they'd look at you and nine out of ten would say, "Great speech." Or Republicans say, "That was an awful speech." But no one's going to say, "Well, he was out there too long, and, you know, was he trying to take the limelight" and all of that.

Inside the beltway or not, the reality for you at the White House was there was an impression of a raging dispute between the Gore campaign and the White House about how the president was going to divide his time in Los Angeles. What do you remember about those discussions?

Well, I remember how silly it was. I remember how baseless it was in fact. What the reality was is--I think the New York Times put this on the front page three days in a row. So, you know, they get to set the reality, not me. So those were the questions I was answering.

So it made us change what we were doing. We had requests from everyone to talk to the president at his last convention, and we had made the decision that the best thing to do was to do the morning shows that came on that Monday morning. So that once the president finished his speech, he could walk off the stage and that was it. You know, that would be the turning point for, everybody to focus their attention now on Gore and Lieberman. I mean, it was ironic that the same sort of anchor people who were going on TV every night saying "The president can't get off center stage," were getting off the air, picking up the phone, calling me, and begging me for an interview.

But, you know, we changed what we were doing. We kept a lower profile because of this, but we couldn't go back to Washington. We were there. It says something about how silly it was.

... During this time the president's concerned not only with the Gore campaign, but the campaign of his own wife for the Senate in New York. To what extent did he tell you how you should deal with the press on Mrs. Clinton running for Senate?

Oh, I can't think of many ways that he didn't have that sort of front and center. He was very involved in it, but I can't remember discussions about how we handle sort of her things. I mean, I'm sure there were. I'm trying to think. You know, at Camp David we had the phone call to Mort Zuckerman, and then the Daily News that he managed to tell me about afterwards. You know, that's always the great phone call, saying, "You know, I just talked to a reporter. I'm not sure it's going to turn out okay, you might want to check it out."

To what extent did the president focus on Hillary Clinton's campaign?

I think the president has the ability to focus on a lot of things, but he's got a big part of him that loves politics, and the first lady's campaign gave him an outlet. You know, here was a place where she very much wanted his advice and involvement, which was not always the case with the presidential campaign, and he very much wanted to give it.

I'll never forget the scene the day she was announcing. They were working on the announcement speech, and different from the president, she had never given one of these before, so she was really nervous. And she had all of the consultants and speech writers around, which were making her crazy.

So he ended up going upstairs in the house in Chappaqua, and out in sort of a finished garage. The speech writer set up the computer. And the president was the one who shuttled back and forth because she couldn't deal with the rest of them. He calmed her down, and helped her with going through and making the changes. And he went back and forth, and at one point, he kept coming down and saying, "Okay. She likes this change, but she doesn't like this change. Let's try it this way." And he would tell someone, and they'd try to type it in. He eventually like kicked the person out of the chair. So you had the president sitting there, you know, putting in some changes on the computer.

And you could tell, on this particular Saturday afternoon he was having more fun than he had had in a long time. I mean, he loved it, because on so many levels he had done this before, and he was both helping her with the words, but also helping her with bucking her up, "You can do this. This is going to be great." So it was for him, it's how he had fun.

To what extent did Hillary Clinton rely on Bill Clinton for political advice in this campaign?

Oh, in a large extent. I think she understands that he has a vast reservoir of political skills and experience, and she relied on that, just as he relied on her political sense, and sense of what was in his best interest over eight years. I mean, this goes back and forth between the two. It just happened that once she decided to run for Senate, she became the person who needed the day-to-day advice and he was always there.

...The new Independent Counsel, Robert Ray, comes out with a report that essentially says there's nothing criminal in the Whitewater investigation. The White House isn't cleared, but there is nothing that can be a provable crime. What was the sense in the White House when that report came out?

Well, there was no sense of surprise on the facts because the president and the first lady knew the facts a lot better than everybody else did. But I think there was some sense that they play by a different set of rules here in Washington, the Independent Counsels, the press, whatever, there's never a straight, "Okay, we looked at it and there's nothing there." It's got to be worded in a way where you can create some sense. You know, $50 million later, if they had something, if there was a criminal act, there would have done it. And you can say the White House wasn't cleared, and you would be wrong. The White House was cleared. The president was cleared. The first lady was cleared. We know that based on what the facts that were put forward are, and, you know, I can't put back in the bottle the 73 front page stories in the Washington Post or the 55 Nightlines about the scandal of Whitewater, but the bottom line is: we had someone who was determined to prove something, went around the country, tied up hundreds of FBI agents, spent 40, $50 million on it, and they didn't' find anything.

What was the sense in the White House that day? Was there a--

I think there was a sense that day that the Independent Counsel, in his own way, had to admit that it was time to move on, there was nothing there. But also a sense that we play by, as I said, a different set of rules here, and you know, there's no such thing as a clean bill of health. You know, a few sentences that suggested by innuendo that there was something there that would stay there, and that the Whitewater thing would never really go away.

Was the president embittered by that?

I think he was long past the sort of Whitewater--I mean, his feelings about the Independent Counsel now are totally focused on what's going to happen after he gets out of office and he continues to have an articulated threat from the Independent Counsel that he will indict him, and that's where his focus is.

The Middle East erupted shortly after that. What was the president's personal response? Did he think it was inevitable as a result of the process breaking down?

I don't know if he believes that it's inevitable, but there's nothing that takes up more of his time. I can't follow it day-to-day like I used to, but I certainly know for the first several weeks of this, he was on the phone several times a day with both of them. I think he understands the limits of his influence through this process. There are times that you just can't put down an uprising on the ground from afar, but he understands his obligation to stay engaged, and to keep both parties in a position of not going to a sort of an irretrievable point where they can't make peace. And that's an ongoing process.

The story the last couple weeks--and obviously, you're out now, but you may have a sense of this based on your contacts--the president's probably the greatest campaigner in a generation. Is he frustrated, do you know, at being kept on a leash by the Gore campaign?

The answer to the question is yes and no, so let me do the no part first. The president understands, as a instinctual politician, that the best thing he could do in this election cycle is be out somewhat under the radar, helping to raise money. That's the best thing he can do for Al Gore, and I think he probably did 200 events.

And one of the reasons why the Democrats, in the last week to ten days, could spend dollar for dollar with Republicans, first time since I can remember that this will be the case. It has always been the Republicans have found some big source of cash and dumped a bunch of money in at the end. So, I think he understands.

But I do think, he's being prematurely taken off the stage, because he's 54 years-old, and he understands the two-term limit, and that you can't run for office forever, but this is the first time he's actually been faced with it. So, sure, there's part of him that says, "Wouldn't it be great if I was out there making my case?" But he has said to me a dozen times that one of the first things he learned about politics was you can't ever effectively make the case that you should vote for somebody else because I say so. So I don't think he sits there and believes, "You know, if I just could get out there, this candidate would win", or "If I could just get out there, that candidate would win." So I think he understands most of this, but I think there's a kind of wistfulness that it's not him running any more.

Working with Bill Clinton, did you get the sense that he was having a whole lot more fun in the job the last year and a half or so?

I think you have to go back a little bit to understand that. I think any president learns on the job, and it's because it's difficult to get your hands around. And my understanding of the situation was sort of by mid-1995, this guy had figured out how to effectively manage the different things you need to do as president, from both the public boy pulpit part to the policy making, and you know, in 1997, we were sidetracked by all of the obsession on campaign finance, and in 1998 we know we had Monica and impeachment.

So I think by the middle of 1999, especially after the success in Kosovo, he was very confident in his ability to do it, and I think it was a lot more fun, and I think if you look at the last 18 or 19 months, it was a time of progress and success at the White House and a time where it wasn't a struggle of "do I have the right staff in the right place? Are we doing things the most effective way we can?" He felt that was true, and I think it was a lot more fun for him.

Did you notice that he was funnier?

He's always been funny. And I think he was a little more willing in the last year and a half to poke fun at himself. I was always a proponent of that. I mean, he understood that if you make fun of yourself five times, you can make fun of the guy you really don't like once and get away with it. But if you just go out and say, "This guy's a jerk" in a funny way, you're going to be seen as someone who's got a problem, and you know, is trying to get even.

And I think one of the things that changed was--I had a slightly different attitude towards these public press dinners, which is I always thought there should be a message. and it was often that if you poke a little fun at yourself, you can poke some fun at the press out there and give them a little message about, "Maybe you obsess too much this way and that way."

And we found the right formula couple times; a couple times I'm not sure we did. But it would have been impossible if he wasn't comfortable with where he was and what he was doing. And, we had him washing the damn limousine. He had to feel comfortable enough in his position in the world to let three camera crews follow him around mowing the lawn and doing that.

Tell us about making that video. That's kind of interesting.

I got the idea to do this probably in February. But my original idea was not to do this--I'm a big fan of the cable show "The Sopranos", and it struck me, with all this psychobabble about the president, the way to make fun of the press would be to have the president sit down with the psychiatrist from that show. And I got as far as--she agreed to do it, but I just--you know, there was just part of me that said, "President, psychiatrist, I can't do it." So I sort of put the idea aside.

And then I went out and did this thing at the White House Correspondent's Association with "The West Wing" cast. And I came back from that, and I immediately brought my staff together and said, "We're doing a video, and it's going to be better than the one we did, because if what comes out of this is people talk about me rather than the president, I'm dead."

So we were sitting around and just kicking around different ideas, and we came upon this sort of "Home Alone" idea ...

How did you at the White House decide that the president ought to make this video?

Well, there was in the press a storyline that had hung around for months and months, that somehow the president, all of his friends had left, and he was wandering around talking to the portraits at night, and this and that. So we wanted to make a video that reflected that we knew how ridiculous this was and we were going to poke some fun at the president, but really be poking fun at those who were writing the story. ...

So anyway, sitting around, we came up with the idea of sort of the "Home Alone" theme, you know. And we had originally started it as the--you know, this as the president talking to the portraits, because there was the old Nixon story of him doing that. And we ended up shooting that but it looked terrible, because, you know, we actually had him talking to the Roosevelt portrait, but it was very poorly lit because we did the whole thing very quickly, so we didn't use that.

But it just naturally started to snowball, you know. Well, if we can get him to cut the lawn, maybe we can get him to wash the car. If we can get him to wash the car, maybe we can get him to ride a bicycle. And if we can get him to ride a bicycle, maybe we can get this kid who plays Stewart on the Ameritrade ads, who Xeroxes his face and does this little dance.

And the whole thing just sort of snowballed. I had originally, out of courtesy, asked the first lady's office if she wanted anything to do with it, and they had said no, because they said that's not something that she'd do. And then word got around about what he had done, and I get this call the day before the event, you know, when we're actually supposed to show this, that says the first lady wants to be in it, so we had to come up with something. You know, how can we use the first lady? And it hit me that one of the things that she's remembered for is the line in New Hampshire about, you know, stand by your man, I'm not just home baking cookies. And I thought, okay, fine. What if we had him staying at home baking cookies? And that was the genesis for him running out with the lunch.

But, you know, the whole thing took less than two hours of his time. And it was not seen as something that would make a major statement about the president and his state of mind, and where the country was, and where we are as a civilization.

And I knew the whole thing had gotten out of hand when I got a call from a friend of mine in Italy, saying that his Italian wasn't so good yet, but there was some story on the air in Italy saying something to the effect of--they think the president may have lost his mind. And I started getting mail from all over the world.

You know, the reaction to it was generally positive. There was a minority that thought that somehow it had demeaned the presidency. That's a judgment for others to make, but--

Is it a judgment that you folks discussed?

No. I mean once it got put together, we thought, "This is pretty funny", but we didn't think that this would be something that would be on the network news two days running. But it made the point. You know, it sort of--in its own sort of silly little way, you know, it was the president, he was able to, just for a few minutes, kind of thumb his nose at all the experts who are so sure they knew how he felt, and so sure they could pinpoint and analyze where his head was. And you know, the irony of all of it is, he never thinks about this stuff, and if you had asked him--I mean, when I asked him to do this, he sort of said, "Sure, if you think it's all right", but kind of looked at me and said, "But why is this funny?" Even when I explained it to him, he was like, "Well, if you're sure that's funny, I'll do it but I don't really get it", because he doesn't sort of play by the rules that most of us do here in Washington. He doesn't sort of get ... what gets people juiced up in this town and what doesn't, because they somehow never managed to learn. It's probably they'll be the better for it down the road, but I think there were times when a little better Washington radar would have served them.

It's interesting that you say that. I mean, in the first term that's why David Gergen was brought in, because the White House thought it needed a Washington radar. You're saying that the president, upon leaving the office, still kind of needed a Washington radar.

No, I think he relied on staff, and I think, particularly in the second term was very comfortable, trusted the people he had around him, very little in-fighting in the second four years as opposed to the first four years. And he became much more comfortable I think as a leader, and much more capable of getting the best out of people. But he never completely grasped the sort of unwritten rules of Washington.

What do you mean there, unwritten rules?

Oh, we have a peculiar way of what works and what doesn't in this town, and the high priests who get to decide things, sitting in the metaphorical salons in Georgetown, and the people--you know, the Sally Quinns and David Broders who say things like, "Not in our town." He never quite understood the thinking of how the elite attempt to form opinion here inside the beltway, and he certainly had a distaste for it, but you can have a distaste for it, which I actually do, but I actually have some sense of how it gets formed, and the pressure points in the process where you can try to head off what most people would think would be normal, but in Washington is considered wrong or verboten.

And I don't get the sense that either one of them, over the eight years--despite everything they learned and how smart they were--ever quite understood the rhythm of this city.

The culture?

The culture, the sense of the people who are here all the time and the entitlement that they feel. The sense that presidents come and go, but we're here, and we set the rules. I can understand not being comfortable with it, but it always surprised me that they never figured out what the rules of the game were. If they figured it out, I doubt they would have played the game, but I always got the sense that he never quite figured out--I said the unwritten rules--but, you know, the rules of how we all play here. And that's not a criticism of him. I mean, it's just an observation.

When you consider the president's historical place, his legacy, if you could, in a succinct way, what do you think history is going to write of him, good and bad?

I think the president set this country and this government on a path that has the potential to extend prosperity beyond our wildest expectations, you know, decades, taking advantage of a global, digital world. If that comes to fruition and we live in a period of unprecedented prosperity, I think this president will be looked upon increasingly with great respect and affection.

I think if the bets he made turn out to be wrong, we will spend a lot more time focusing on the impeachment and all that went around that. But it's my guess that if we continue going in the direction we are, and future presidents are able to meet the challenge, that the 1990s will be seen as a pivotal time in our history, where the president was an extraordinary economic steward. Whether that will happen or not, I don't know. But to the extent that the success that we've enjoyed over the last eight years continues, I think that will more and more, as the years go by, define his legacy.

To the extent that this is an aberration, that we continue to go through boom and bust, and this great promise of this time is really empty, then I think he'll be a president remembered for impeachment.

Some people have said something along the lines of history will remember him as a good president who could have been a great president but for personal flaws. Do you buy that?

I think the great part about history is it's not written yet, so those who try to predict it, generally don't know what they're talking about. I think we don't know the impact of the changes he's made on how we manage our economy, so, again, if the impact is profound, I think he'll be seen as a great president who understood things before his time. If we're headed off in the wrong direction or there's some changes that we have no way of anticipating or dealing with, or the leadership is lacking down in the future, then I think he will be remembered more for the limitations he placed on himself than on the things he did. But there's no--the great part about this is there's no way to know this. This is entirely a guessing game that you can't really begin to answer for another 20 or 30 years.

Did impeachment prevent him from accomplishing things that he would have? He said, for example in his interview with Joe Klein in The New Yorker, that Social Security and Medicare essentially were the victims of impeachment. From your own perspective, are there things this president didn't accomplish because of that?

I have no doubt that in his mind he doesn't believe they were opportunities missed. I have a slightly different view, which is impeachment was a manifestation of a partisan political environment run amuck, and that if it wasn't impeachment, our politics have gotten so poisonous, that it would have been something else. And on issues like Social Security and Medicare, this president and this Congress were not going to have a meeting of the minds. So I'm not sure that impeachment stopped anything.

In an odd way, we sort of put ourselves on a path through the limited role of the Executive Branch. The president will be remembered in some circles, almost as much for not what he did, but what he stopped from happening. You know, the path that we were going to take if Newt Gingrich and the people who swept into power in 1994 wanted us to go on was, I think, quite destructive. So whether he'll be remembered or not for stopping that is--it's hard to remember a negative--it's quite important. But he did keep us on this economic path.

... No one will ever forget that this was a president who was impeached. It's so rare that it happens, that it has to be part of the story. But it becomes a question of whether it defines the story or is part of the story, and I don't think anybody knows that yet.

On the OIC, did the president fear that he was going to be prosecuted after leaving office?

I think the president believes that there's a very real possibility that the Independent Counsel will prosecute, that that's what he's moving toward, and I can provide no evidence to the contrary. I mean, you don't keep the office open unless you plan to do something with it. And it's an odd sort of thing, because we've had some discussions in the late summer, early fall, where the president has said several times, "He's probably going to do this, and you need to prepare people for that."

But the odd thing is, is the more we criticize the Independent Counsel, the more the media goes his side. And in this one we've left him alone, and the media's been fairly unanimous, for the editorial pages and the columnists, in criticizing the Independent Counsel for not letting go. So it's an interesting challenge for how you do this. But--

The president's definitely concerned, and you could tell that?

Sure. He knows that, from experience, that common sense doesn't live at the Independent Counsel's Office, and after everything they've done, it would be no surprise if they decided, even after everything had happened in impeachment and everything that happened constitutionally on the Hill, that if they decided that one more time they had to try to prosecute the president.

What did he say about that? Did that make him angry or does the prospect make him incredibly agitated?

I think the president is a human being, and the prospect of being hounded even out of the White House for something that started a long time ago before he got in the White House, is frustrating and makes him angry, and concerned. The real skill that I admire, [is] his ability to put it aside and do his job, because he's been able to do that, at least in the four years that I was there.