It was a strategy born of necessity and it was not very comfortable because Bill Clinton enjoys the repartee and the interaction with the press. I think he would have preferred not to have an environment in which he couldn't do what candidates normally do.

But when there is a singular focus of a press corps that is 180 degrees different [from] the communication you're trying to have with the American people in the midst of an election campaign, there's not much you can do. ... I threw in the towel at that point.

The press wanted to focus exclusively on questions related to campaign finance. It was their big story. They chafed at the fact that Bill Clinton had coasted through the entire reelection campaign, remaining very ahead in the polls. They had never really gotten at him and the race [wasn't] as close as everyone had thought it would likely be.

The press corps collectively wanted an issue that they could use to put Bill Clinton on the griddle and cut him down to size a little bit and we just didn't make that opportunity available. It was painful for the press secretary, I'll tell you that. But it was also necessary. ... When you're in the final weeks of the campaign, the voters actually pay attention to the race and what the candidates are talking about and they listen. The candidates, because they have multiple opportunities to talk directly to the voters, can deliver their message that way. So, it's a flow of information. It's not like you're hiding in a bunker somewhere.

We just elected to have our conversation directly with the voters and not through the press corps and it was irritating to many of the reporters. Still is to this day.

Are you convinced that helped Clinton win?

		Bill Clinton delivers his victory speech on election night 1996. (11/5/96)

So, we probably were better off being there than going back and forth about campaign finance. On the other hand, matters have only gotten worse since then. Maybe if we had paid more of a political price during the course of 1996, some of the practices that we're now seeing four years later would not have developed, because there's essentially no rules now at all covering campaign finance.

On the '96 election, as you say, your strategy was to keep the president from the press because of the singular focus the press had. In the wake of what were pretty rocky relations between this administration and the White House press corps, was this another insult for the press that turned out later to poison the well or hurt further down the road?

Clinton never got to a point where that relationship with the press corps was a comfortable one. It was always contentious and something always happened to make it less than the kind of easygoing banter that some presidents have enjoyed. It may just be impossible to create that kind of relationship now. It may be no longer available to any president.

It's too bad. I famously tried several things to warm relations between the press corps and the president by making the president more available in relaxed settings. None of it worked particularly well. The formality that comes into only having the president available in these public occasions and occasionally in press conferences, that might be the rule for the future.

But the truth is, there was just always a contentious relationship. There was not a lot of trust on either side. The press corps didn't trust Bill Clinton very much and Bill Clinton didn't trust the press corps to present fairly the work of his administration.

In '97, you say the major accomplishment is the balanced budget. Do you remember any particular moment that stands out or anything that the president had said to you that jumps out as an anecdote?

There was some sense that you really were redefining the center of the Democratic Party, ... a real sense that the Democrats finally owned the issue of fiscal discipline and could legitimately portray themselves as a party that knew how to use government but knew how to use it prudently.

The times in which you could really tag the Democratic Party with the label "big spender," "tax and spender," that that was going to go by the wayside, because we had demonstrated that a Democratic president, a Democratic White House would work to balance the budget.

Fast forward to January '98. How do you hear about the Lewinsky scandal developing? What is your first recollection? Was it Drudge over that weekend?

Yeah, it was Drudge over the weekend and information that was not taken very seriously at first because it sounded so utterly improbable. Early the following week ... Tuesday night, we hear that the Post is going to go with the story, that the three-judge court has authorized this new line of inquiry for the Independent Counsel's Office and it revolves around these allegations about a relationship with a young intern.

What do you find out about it and what do you try to find out about it?

I remember this. It's sort of the quality of being in a state of disbelief. The human instinct is to say, "Well, that can't possibly be true. That's more sludge from Drudge." That was the instant take on the story. So, we marched off looking for the ammunition we needed to knock the story down and, of course, it just didn't come.

We kept asking lawyers and others, "Where is the strong denial? We need to have a very strong denial." The president, as he struggled with the story the day that it broke, went through a lot of contorted answers in three interviews that he gave that day in which there were questions about which verb tense he had used. We were all looking at each other, saying "He didn't deny it strongly enough."

We didn't listen carefully as a staff. If we had listened more carefully initially to the way the president struggled with the answer, warning lights would have gone off.

My own personal reaction was--as it has been every time there was a matter involving allegations or scandal or anything else--is to tread very carefully. Rely on what you get from lawyers, because you cannot violate the president's rights by going to him and asking him what's going on.

If I had gone to him and said, "What's the deal with you and this intern?" and he had answered the question, that information would have exposed me to great legal liability. I would have been subpoenaed and the president would have forfeited the right to deal with this matter with his attorneys in confidence. It was a very, very awkward and hard situation.

Nobody wants to talk about it and yet you have to come up with some kind of denial. Once the signal from the president was that he was denying the story, then we said, "You've got to get in there and deny the thing with every ounce of energy you've got." Of course, that was bad, bad advice. He got that advice obviously from more than several of us.

Just to back up a minute in the storytelling of this. So, Tuesday night, you know the story is going to break. You make some phone calls. Wednesday morning, you see the Post headline. What is your gut, visceral feeling when you see that?

I don't think I want to describe what my gut was telling me to do at that point, because it had more to do with vomiting than anything else. But you read this and you said, this is incredible and it was hard to believe. It was hard to imagine that any of this amounted to anything other than sort of a weird bender that we were on for the day.

It was totally bizarre to be sitting there, looking at this paper, reading this kind of story about the President of the United States of America. You [wondered], what country did I wake up in this morning? I'm reading this about the leader of the free world.

So, you make phone calls and what did you find out?

We didn't make phone calls. We were quite accustomed to being in crisis mode. So, we were in crisis mode and everyone was methodically thinking about the things we need to do. Where is the president going to be publicly available to the press? How do we adjust his schedule given this story? Do we suspend some of these interviews that are scheduled to occur? Do we go ahead with them?

We had practical decisions to make and this was true throughout the whole period of 1998. There was a government to run. We had jobs to do. You know, we were not appointed by the president nor was the president elected by the American people to dwell on this very awkward personal story, this matter that was really about Bill Clinton, the man. It wasn't about Bill Clinton the president.

So, all of us had to remember that we still had to get up and report for duty and do the work that the American people expected of us everyday. That's how you get through something like that. You just don't get wrapped up personally in the story.

You say that advice was given to the president from you and others that he wasn't being forceful enough.

Right. I'm accepting your chronology, I think. But the story breaks on a Tuesday night. We go through Wednesday. The president gives some interviews on Wednesday that don't sound particularly convincing. He stumbles through questions in some of these interviews that had been long, long scheduled.

So, we then see where we are going. And I think it was Thursday that everyone convinces the president to get out there and be adamant about his denial. Of course, he had been hearing the same thing from his friend, Harry Thomason, and others who were there helping him through this very difficult moment.

Thomason comes in because, according to him, he thinks the problem is one of stage craft.

Yeah, right and [that we hadn't] found the right venue to be convincing about this matter. All of us were giving him the advice that it would best for you to go and confront this matter and demonstrate that you are passionately denying it. It was, as I say, very bad advice, given the reality.

Do you remember the first press briefing that you conducted on this?

I don't remember specifically the first one. I remember they all blend together to one period of torment that I'll never forget. I guess what I remember most about that briefing was walking into the briefing room and saying to myself, "There is no physical way to fit this many cameras and this many people into this room."

I remember almost laughing to myself saying, "This is definitely a fire hazard or this is an occupational safety violation waiting to be served on somebody." It was a circus. I certainly was not the lion tamer. I was there more as the morsel to be served up, I think.

Was your confidence somewhat shaken at this point, early on?

I think my confidence was shaken. I didn't have access to the truth. There were reasons for that that I understood. It wasn't because anybody was deliberately not giving it to me. It's because I think the lawyers were trying to assemble the answers to some of these questions. They were dealing with a very determined, aggressive prosecutor and we just didn't have facts.

Because we didn't have facts, we had this kind of flimsy little statement that I wasn't going to budge from and that's what I waved around as my only line of defense for most of those briefings.

Later on, as the investigation proceeds, first of all, Monica Lewinsky agrees to cooperate with the Independent Counsel. And you give a briefing in which you say the president's basically pleased. I remember Sam gave you a hard time about that. The president couldn't have been pleased at that moment.

But ... if she cooperates there won't be any problem because the truth is the truth. ... He lived with that fiction and allowed all the rest of us to live with that fiction, too. But you see the logic of it. If you're denying that you've had any inappropriate relationship with this woman, then of course you want her to cooperate to tell the truth, because that's the truth. So it was perfectly logical. The fact that no one was buying that had put us in the awkward circumstances that we were in.

The day before the president's grand jury appearance, there's a front-page story in the New York Times which hints that the president is going to change his version of events. What did you think when you read that story?

This is in August, fast-forwarding to August?

Right, right.

This was the most frustrating period I had as press secretary. There was a story in the New York Times with four bylines on it of all solid, good reporters, indicating that the president is about to change his story, that he's going to admit to a very inappropriate relationship with the intern, Monica Lewinsky, that he's prepared to accept whatever the consequences are for that.

I wandered all throughout the White House, talking to all the president's lawyers and all the president's men and women, trying to say, "Somebody has a media strategy here that I haven't been clued into." ... And not a single person took any responsibility for that.

In fact, everyone who is a likely source of that story specifically told me that they didn't give it out. In fact, some of them said it would be crazy for us to leak a story like that because we wouldn't want to give Ken Starr a roadmap in advance of the president's deposition.

But clearly someone did it. Or, what is entirely likely as well, a number of people politically trying to be helpful to the president started exploring with senior figures of the party. What if the president gives this kind of testimony? What would be the reaction? There was some attempt to take temperature.

And then from that, people thought they had some authoritative signals that the president was going to give X, Y and Z testimony. [Even though] the Clinton administration is often accused of having these clever strategies for dealing with the press, there was completely zero advance planning over the flow of those stories. There was a New York Times story citing four sources the following day. Bob Woodward has a byline in the Washington Post with much the same kind of take on what the president's testimony would be.

No one said to me, "You can go and confirm that story because that is, in fact, what the president is going to do." But of course, no one said you can't deny it either. ... So, I was sitting there once again looking like a complete idiot because there was no information that I had that I could use to answer obvious questions.

Did you at any time get the sense that the president was using this leak as a way to prepare his wife?

I don't know. That has been speculated upon as a possible theory. There may be truth to that, I just don't know.