A bad imitation of summer camp. It was a little bit goofy. Here we were. We had been embattled for three weeks on all these various fronts, trying to put together an economic plan, and we're going to take off a whole two days, to get our sense of direction for the administration and to sort of bond as a team. I guess there's some good sentiment behind that. It's important to bond as a team. On the other hand, we had had a campaign and an election that was suppose to determine the direction for the country. We had an awful lot of work to do back at the White House. And there was no way that anything like this was going to be anything but caricature in the press.

Everybody had to talk about their fears, the most embarrassing . . .

Everybody. But that Saturday night, a smaller group of the cabinet appointees and some senior White House staff had to sit around and talk about something about themselves that no one else knew and what they like to do. Warren Christopher talked about liking to go to hotel jazz bars, which was kind of incongruous, but it was a nice thing to know. I think it was the first time I think I ever heard the president tell the story about getting knocked over by the boar when he was six years old. I think I said something kind of stupid, something about watching the Today show when I was seven years old. But it was a little uncomfortable. And I remember walking away from that night having even greater respect for Senator Lloyd Bensen who had become our secretary of treasury, because he refused to go.

Did the president actually have to be taught how to salute? And some military types weren't satisfied with his salute?

I don't know about some military types. Some pundits. But he was getting hit for it, regardless. . . . The criticism of the salute was that he just didn't have a crisp enough salute. I've looked back at some of those pictures. And it's kind of a tendentious charge, I suppose, but it had become real. And it was, again, one of those moments -- who could tell him? Clinton and Gore at that time were very competitive in, in an odd way, in a personal way. So it didn't really feel right for Gore to tell him. It would be a little bit too personal. I, obviously, couldn't tell him. I didn't serve in the military. I didn't know anything about that. So the responsibility fell to his National Security Adviser, Tony Lake. who had a very brief private meeting with the president, where he talked about crispening up the salute. And it kind of worked.

During these early months, the raging policy discussion in the White House is the economic one, and whether deficit reduction ought to come first, or whether some of the social investments that you talked about in the campaign ought to come first. Where did you stand on that? And how passionate was the debate?

I wanted to keep as many of the promises as we could. I was committed to the "putting people first" agenda and actually saw my role, in many ways, as a defender of the promises. So I wanted to do as much of the investment and keep as much of the tax cut as we could, and not to the exclusion of deficit reduction. But that's more where my heart was and where I thought we had to protect ourselves politically.

. . . It actually was a debate that was over almost before it began. It really wasn't possible in any realistic way not to do deficit reduction. The combination of the power of the president's opposition, the demands of the bond market, the demands of the Federal Reserve and the business community made it essential to hit a credible number. . . . Somehow the magic number became $140 billion -- no plan would be seen as credible if it didn't hit $140 billion. I said, "If we can do $137 billion and get part of the middle-class tax cut or get more money for our welfare reform proposal or Americorps, that sounds worth it to me." But, no, it had to be $140 billion.

You say that this debate really was over. But didn't the political team raise a lot of objections to hearing all this deficit talk when, in fact, it hadn't been a huge part of the campaign?

The issue was more in the transition of it. By the time we get to the White House, it was pretty clear you had to hit this number. There were certainly fights over the rhetoric and which things to emphasize in the speech. And we wanted to do both. And the truth, in part, was that because we put out a 200-page book of our campaign promises, you could use it to justify anything you wanted to do. We promised to cut the deficit in half in the campaign. There were moments in the campaign where Clinton promised to balance the budget, in addition to promising all the social investments.

Woodward writes here, "One of the problems with the job and one of the little secrets was that a number of fights you picked with the press were on direct order from Hillary. She has a view that reporters shouldn't get away with anything. She believed there were evil people in Washington and the press was part of that evil." What's your take on that?

That's a little overstated. But we picked a lot of the wrong battles early on. Rather than simply focus on what we said in the campaign on the problems of real people and the fixing those problems, we had this whole separate agenda of changing the culture of Washington and doing things in a new way. What fits into that? Having the first lady run the health care project. We're going to do that in a new way. Showing the press who is boss. Admirably, having a cabinet that looks different from cabinets in the past. Taking on the lobbyists. There are some good ideas in there, but much of the time spent taking on the culture got in the way of advancing our agenda.

Did the travel office story come out of that hubris?

Yes. We're going to do it our way. We're going to bring in our own people. These guys have been coddling the press and coddling our enemies for an awfully long time. They're too closely tied to the Republicans. Looking back, who cares? What a wasted six months.

You say, "Who cares?" But at the time it became a symbol of not only arrogance, but of cronyism.

See, that, I think is a blind spot that the Clintons had. And in part because they had defined themselves, when they were coming into politics, against the abuses of the Nixon era, against Watergate, against Vietnam. In some ways, they couldn't believe that they were being charged with the same sorts of abuses and resented it deeply. You can understand why they would resent that. I don't think anything that happened there rises to the level of what happened in Watergate. But simply being charged with it caused them to tighten up. And they couldn't understand how it would look at all. Wrongly, obviously.

When Mrs. Clinton comes in, she's given the office in the West Wing. Her chief of staff gets an office in the West Wing. That's terribly important symbolically.

It's a different kind of partnership -- two for the price of one. We're going to show a modern couple, a modern White House. We're going to do things in a different way. That got in the way of advancing the agenda we wanted to advance. That became the issue and the management. Is it appropriate? Is it right for a first lady to manage a legislative issue? And I think one of the things that Mrs. Clinton learned over time in the White House was that there are battles that was not necessarily worth being fought. Yes, the battle for health care should be fought, but let's do it in a different way.

When she was put in charge of health care, was there general agreement that that was an appropriate and good idea?

There wasn't a lot of discussion beforehand. I looked at it and thought, this will work. It shows how much the president cares about an issue. He's putting his wife in charge, the person that he's closest to in the world. It shows his commitment. It was my own blind spot too. I think that's true, but it also brought on all these other problems.

Was one of the issues that it was above criticism because Mrs. Clinton was in charge, that staff even wanting to ...

It makes it harder, even though I think that she, at times, tried to encourage, "Just treat me like anyone else, let's have real debates while I'm heading this." But it can't help but have a chilling effect because you know that she goes home with the president at night. She gets the last word. And that disagreement may carry over into other issues. And I think a lot of people did pull their punches because of that.

In May, 1993, David Gergen is brought into the White House. Here you are -- the guys who won. You fought the campaign and the president was bringing in...

Ronald Reagan's communications director. Not my happiest day in the White House. And although it was, in part, well deserved, I took the fall for a lot of the problems in the first six months. It turned out to be the best thing in the world for me both professionally. I think I was able to help the president more in the new job, but I was kind of the symbol of the kids being swept aside.

How did the president tell you about that?

It kind of broke and there had been a lot of buzz. Right after we won the economic plan, the first House vote, I got some rumblings. Then he was away giving a speech the whole next day and it started to break in the press. I didn't know what was going on. I knew something was happening, but I didn't really know. . . . He called me around 1:30 in the morning and says, "George, I think we've got to make this announcement tomorrow morning. I think it's the best thing. I need you by my side." Perfect thing to say. I mean, I was going to get publicly humiliated. Moved out of this job. But in three sentences, even though it was late in the game, he says, "I need you by my side." So that's exactly the reassurance I needed to hear to go through with the job change. He said exactly the right thing.

What was the reaction among you and the other members of the team when Gergen came in?

The negative reaction wasn't really personal. I had known David and thought he was pretty well respected. But it was, we're bringing in Ronald Reagan's communications director to clean up. What's happening? It felt like a betrayal of the things that we had fought for.

. . . I knew I couldn't show any unhappiness, or displeasure, or the blood would be in the water, and I would have no chance of keeping any job in the White House. But there was this sense of the kids getting blamed for a lot of things that weren't their fault. The kids didn't pick Zoe Baird. The kids didn't do the travel office. The kids didn't do gays in the military. But at the same time, the criticism that the culture of the White House was somehow a little immature was true, and I was the public face of that. So I had to accept it.

In June 1993, the next month, Vince Foster commits suicide. Do you remember that night, that day?

Even if I didn't, it's been investigated so many times now, I couldn't forget. Yes. The president was doing Larry King Live from first floor basement of the White House. And right after he started the taping, right around nine o'clock, I'm standing in the hallway with Mack McLarty and Bill Burton, Mack's assistant, comes in, pulls us aside and says, "Got some bad news. I think Vince Foster killed himself."

And you're kind of shocked. I didn't know Vince that well. I wasn't a friend of his. I didn't work that much with him, but he was obviously a close friend of Mack's. And here was a little bit of shock. But as with all moments in the White House, whatever personal feelings you have, you immediately put aside, because this is a matter of great public importance right from the start.

We decided right away that we couldn't say anything to the president, since he was in the middle of the taping. Mack went to call Hillary. I had to call Web Hubbell, who was Vince's law partner and best friend, with the news.

. . . And I said, "Web, I don't know how to say this to you, but Vince killed himself." And he said, "What?" "Vince killed himself." "What?" He made me repeat it seven times. He just couldn't absorb the information. Then the night kind of unfolded . . . While the president is doing this Larry King Live, the information is confirmed. And it's clear that Vince Foster did kill himself. We're starting to get the information out. And now we had this very particular small problem we had to deal with. We knew that Larry King would ask the president to stay on for another hour. The president still didn't know that Vince Foster had killed himself. And we were scared to death that the story would break on the AP wire and Larry King would be asking him about it, and it would be the first he heard.

At the end of the hour, Larry says, "Do you want to come back for another hour right now?" And Clinton says yes. And Mack is standing behind him saying, "No, no, no." And he's looking at Mack and his eyes widen a little bit. He doesn't really know what it's about. And he's kind of getting a little annoyed. But then they stop, and at the break Mack pulls Clinton aside and tells him. I remember watching from across the hall and all I could see was almost an imperceptible buckling, a slumping by Clinton. But he nodded his head, and we didn't go back for the next hour.

And then Clinton, Mack, and I rode up to the kitchen on the second floor. I said, "We're going to have to put out a statement." And he just said, "You know what to say." And it wasn't mean or anything like that. It was just he was completely in another place. And he wanted to go be with Vince's family. And that's what he ended up doing that evening. For the rest of us, we put out the statement and went home. The difficulty for that whole next 24 hours, the next 48 hours, was that we were dealing with this very personal sense that someone we worked with, in some cases quite closely, had just killed himself. It's a very personal loss. And combine that with the idea that, if the pressures got to him at this way, could it be getting to us in a way we're not really aware of? Everyone in the White House was trying to take care of each other for that 24, 48 hours. You couldn't walk by someone in the hall without stopping and saying, "Are you okay? How are you feeling? Do you want to talk about it?"

And then Clinton sort of reinforced that in his first messages both to the staff and the press. And, again, looking back what we perceived to be a very human response to a human tragedy -- the suicide of one of our colleagues -- saying things like, "No one can know what drove someone to suicide," saying that, "We should give the family and the White House time to deal with this," sounded to the outside world like the seeds of a cover-up. And we were completely blind to that at that moment.

In September, in a historic moment, perhaps the biggest foreign policy success of the first year is the handshake with Arafat and Rabin. But this has to be carefully choreographed, because the wrong picture can send the wrong message. So what do you do to prep for that?

We didn't have a lot of time, but we did an awful lot of prep for a single handshake. We actually choreographed it. We did dress rehearsals in my office on the Saturday. There were about four of us, Rahm and John Podesta, and a couple of others. Everybody played a character and tried to figure out which order the handshakes go in. And we got all that worked out on Saturday.

But then the final dress rehearsals didn't come until we got to the Oval Office the morning of the event. And the big concern that morning was not the handshake itself, but the potential hug. And there was a deep concern that all of these months and years of negotiations would be upset by Arafat's exuberance -- when Clinton reached over to shake Arafat's hand, he would reach over to Clinton and hug him. And that would just be unacceptable to the Israelis, who were happy to be signing this agreement, but didn't want it to be seen like purely a moment of great joy.

How did they prep to avoid a hug?

Tony Lake is playing Arafat. And Clinton comes up with the defensive maneuver that he would use in case Arafat goes for the hug. If Arafat went for the hug, Clinton would squeeze in underneath the biceps and block him. If that didn't work, he'd do a knee to the groin. Everybody broke up laughing.

It turned out to be unnecessary. . . . There were all these last minute nits to the agreement. And everybody was getting very tense and saying, "Oh, it's going to fall apart, it's going to fall apart." . . . One of the chief negotiators would come in with these notes for Tony Lake. And one of the notes said Arafat wants to wear his gun. Lake would write back, he can't wear his gun. Arafat wants to wear his uniform. Can't wear his uniform. Has to be a safari suit. Arafat wants to wear his medals. No.

And this is all going on the whole morning. And then at the last minute, we find out that there actually is a problem with the treaty. Perez had agreed to a way of identifying the Palestinians or the PLO that he hadn't cleared with Rabin. And so they were having their own problems in the final minutes.

And meanwhile, the rest of us knew it was going to work out, basically. You couldn't bring everybody to the stage and it doesn't work out at that point. And we were kind of fascinated spectators of all these little moments. Like the moment when we're getting ready to go out to the lawn and Arafat's group enters the same room as Rabin's group. And you see them, just the group circling each other in the Red Room, almost like a Viennese waltz without ever touching. And they refuse to touch. And then a moment that I found out about later -- just before Clinton, Rabin, and Arafat went out to the lawn, they're standing in the door leading out to the White House lawn, waiting to be introduced. Arafat leans over as if he's going to shake Rabin's hand and Rabin goes, "Outside." And he refused to shake his hand.

I found out about this much later in the afternoon, after the ceremony, when I was debriefing Clinton to figure out what we could say to the press. He told me this story. Of course, we couldn't tell that to the press at that moment. But it was such a great detail. Essentially Rabin saying, "I'm going to shake his hand, I know I have to do it, but I'll be damned if we're going to do it without anybody watching."

When the ceremony does occur, you look over at your colleague, Rahm Emmanuel. What do you notice?

He's overcome. He's crying. And for me this was a pretty big moment. It was an important moment in the White House. But I didn't have this deep visceral connection to the Middle East. Rahm had served in the Israeli army. His father was a Holocaust survivor. And for him to be able to have the chance to work on something that would bring peace to Israel -- I couldn't imagine what the comparable experience would be like in my life. But watching him, this tough guy, breaking down and seeing everyone on the lawn who had worked for years for just a moment like this was the most fulfilling moment I think I had in the White House. Because it felt like something that really, really mattered and might work.

In October 1993 . . . Mogadishu happens. The pictures hit the networks. Clinton is looking at these pictures. What's it like in the White House at this moment?

Clinton is angry, and in a bit of denial, saying, "How did this happen? How did I get pushed into this? I didn't approve anything like this." And there was this whole debate over the creeping of the mission in Somalia over the course of that summer. And he's also conflicted. On the one hand, he says, we've got to send them a message. We can't allow people to think they can get away with something like this. On the other hand, he knows that the original mission we went in for -- to help feed the people of Somalia -- was still the right mission. He knows that the minute those pictures are aired, there are going to be calls for an immediate pullout, but also believes that we have to find some way to forestall that, so we can complete the mission. It's like anything else in the White House. One of the things you learn is there are so many things happening all at the same time, you almost can't get too consumed with any one of them.

You talk about a meeting where he walks into your office one Friday evening, late in October. Do you remember that?

He throws the CIA report about the fighting in Somalia on my desk. And he's weary. It's late in the day. It's the end of the week. And he asks me, "Do you think it will be okay?" I said, "I think so. I think you're doing the right thing. You have to try to complete this." And he says, "I know." And he just sort of walks away. One of the things that I think is just most attractive about him is how seriously he took every responsibility of the office, whatever came later. He knew at this moment that, yes, Americans had paid a price, and that he and we had probably made some mistakes in the way the mission developed. But he also was pretty determined not to allow those concerns or the political concerns to drive him out of a mission where he thought America was doing the right thing.

It's been written often that the Clinton team at this point considers foreign policy something to be avoided, that it's Tony Lake's job to keep it away from the president until it absolutely has to get to him. What's your take on that? You're elected to fix the economy and foreign policy is on the back burner?

I've heard that said so many times by so many people and still believe that it's fundamentally wrong. Did anybody want to sacrifice moving ahead on our economic agenda for foreign policy? No. But did people really believe that the president should not be doing his job? No. And he did spend time on all the foreign matters he had to. He became more comfortable over time with that role as he became more comfortable with the issues, and began to understand the importance of the symbolism, both in how he spoke about it and how much time he spent on it. But I think it's just a simplistic misreading of our focus on the economy to say that the president didn't want to do foreign policy or didn't think it was his job.

. . . At the end of 1993, Whitewater has been building a little bit. And there is a lot of discussion in the White House. The Washington Post is going to start reporting. They've requested some documents. There's a lot of discussion about whether the Post ought to get these Whitewater documents. Do you remember that meeting?

December 11, right. It was a Saturday morning in the president's dining room after the radio address. And Gergen and Mark Gehr and, I think, Bruce Lindsey had been working with the Post. They were asking for all these various documents about Whitewater. And I think most of us believed that the best way to handle this will be just give them the documents, no matter what they show. And there was, far as we knew, no evidence of any wrongdoing. Give them the documents. It would be a couple days of bad stories, and we'll move on.

Gergen and I often clashed, but this was one area where the two of us were just in complete agreement. The best way to deal with this was to turn this over to the Post. And we took different tacks in arguing with the president on why he should do this. Gergen took the tack that, "You've actually received quite favorable coverage from the Washington Post. You received the best first year of coverage of any president I've ever worked with." I took a somewhat different tack to get to the same end. I agreed with the president. "Mr. President, you're right. The Post has been unfair. All the press has been unfair. They've been out to get you from the start. All the more reason to give them this right now. Don't give an excuse. Instead, let's just give them the documents, then we'll move on. And you won't open yourself up to the cover-up charge."

It seemed to me, at the time, that we had him convinced. He said he wanted to go think about it. He went back later that afternoon and we just got the word through Mack that he decided not to. And basically the lawyer said it was too risky. Hillary and the lawyer said it was too risky, and they weren't going to do it.

You had a confrontation with Hillary about this in January of 1994.

Yes. In front of a lot of people. [Laughs] Yes. It was right around the time when it looked like this predictably, after we didn't turn in the documents, the press started to get ahold of it. There started to be calls for a special counsel from Republicans and others in the Senate and the House. And by January, it had become just like a full-blown mini scandal. It was the only thing in the paper for days and days and days on end. Democrats -- Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Bob Kerrey, and others -- had started to call for a special counsel as well. And it was inevitable. I was trying to make the argument that it's going to happen one way or the other. It's now inevitable. The only question is, do we find a way to contain it, ask for it ourselves so we can move on?

You ask for a special counsel?

We're either going to get it imposed on us or we can ask for it ourselves. The only way to get to appear that we're not hiding anything is simply to ask for it and move on. Everybody's agreeing. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Then Hillary walks in. Everybody goes silent. And since I had been the last one talking, I felt like it was sort of a manner of honor to then say to her what I had just been saying when she wasn't in the room. I made this case that we had to go forward, that we had no choice anymore but to go for a special counsel. And, man, she just jumped down my throat, and basically said, "You never believed in us. You never stood for us. We were all alone in New Hampshire," and it was fierce and chilling.

And I was kind of stunned. It was the most hurtful thing I thought she could say, especially in front of all my colleagues at the time. Thinking about it, I felt sorry for her too, because you could just see there was so much fear in her eyes. I think, in her mind, she's just been through the hardest year of her life. Her father had died. One of her best friends had killed himself. She was trying to move health care, something she had worked on her whole life, and now she was being accused of being a criminal, something she'd never faced before in her life. And she felt alone. It wasn't much of a bomb at the moment when it was being taken out on me. But . . .

She said, "You gave up on us."

Right. The worst thing she could say. I didn't believe it. I knew it wasn't true. I didn't like hearing it. I still felt the best thing was to go forward with the counsel, that I was acting in their interest. But it was fierce.

Later, in January . . . Whitewater is still dominating the agenda. You're back in the White House. He's dealing with foreign leaders.

And we have a final conference call. It had been arranged by Harold Ickes. We were going to have a final mini-debate on the question over the phone for the president. Bernie Nussbaum was arguing the case against asking for a special counsel. I was leading the team that said we have no choice but to ask for one.

What looks so odd in retrospect, but didn't feel odd at the time, is that a group of us, Bernie, me, Harold, David Kendall, the president's lawyer, and I think Hillary were in the Oval Office talking into the speakerphone and the president wasn't there. Looking back, what were we doing in the Oval Office? You're not supposed to be in the Oval Office when the president's not there. It's his office. It's the office of the elected President of the United States. It's one of those blind spots that I think we had to the importance of revering the institution.

It was disrespectful, you thought?

I didn't think so then. But we shouldn't be in that office. But we had this argument over the speakerphone. I argued one side, Bernie argued the other. Now, it turns out that Bernie's warnings were correct. He said, "Listen, once you have a special counsel, you can't control it." That may be, but we had no choice. If we didn't do it ourselves, it was being done to us. We already had majorities in the Congress against us. And they could have gotten one appointed without our consent. And I said, that this was the only way to show that we were open and to move on. And the president finally agreed.

Going back to the decision on turning the records over to the Post, what about that decision now? In retrospect, do you regret it?

If I could take back one day, one decision in my time at the White House, it would be the decision made on December 11, 1993, not to turn over those papers to the Washington Post. Can't be proved, but I firmly believe that if we turn those over, we would have never had a Whitewater special counsel. If you never have the Whitewater special counsel, you never have Monica. You never have the impeachment of the president.

The story would have died?

It would have flared for three days in the Washington Post, a lot of cluck, cluck, clucking, but the bottom line would have been there's no illegal activity here. Let's move on.

In December of 1993, just as health care was in a critical time, the Troopergate story breaks in the American Spectator and then the Los Angeles Times. What happens here? You've been here many times, and here it happens again.

[Laughter.] . . . It was stuff that happened in Arkansas. We had been through that before. And basically, I thought we had learned that these sex stories just weren't going to make that much of a difference. What enraged me, and drove me crazy was this sense that Clinton called one or two of the troopers after the story came out. And for me that was pure deja vu, calling Gennifer, like, "Don't try to fix it yourself. Just let it go. And all of the troubles always come when you get into this maneuvering of trying to work your way through it." And especially calling these people from the Oval Office -- it's just nuts.

. . . In February, 1994, the Paula Jones thing comes back, and now she is giving this press conference. She's out there with a story and apparently aggrieved. How do you play this in the White House?

When it first comes out . . . she's giving this press conference at the Conservative Political Action Committee, charging several years after the fact that some incident may or may not have happened in the Excelsior Hotel. Basically we just pointed to the messenger and said as little as possible. And it basically worked. There wasn't a lot of evidence behind it. The charges were flimsy at first, and she was being promoted by these Clinton haters. Let the picture speak for itself.

Meanwhile, there was this big internal debate, though, going on at the Washington Post over whether or not it was appropriate to do a full-scale investigation and a story. We were working quite hard on that. There were a couple of camps inside the Washington Post, one arguing very strenuously to pursue it, to investigate it, to publish it, and another arguing not to.

I ended up having a lunch with the editor of the Washington Post, where I essentially laid out all the reasons why I felt it would be inappropriate to give so much credence to the charges when they were so flimsy. And I basically was arguing that simply by publishing her charges, the Post was saying, "We believe they're credible." They're making that independent judgment.

I don't know what effect that had on their decision making. But it was something we were really working hard on. But finally, when she actually filed a lawsuit, it showed the perversion of the legal system and how we criminalized all of these political differences. But once the lawsuit is filed, it's news.

In April, 1994, after the commodities deal and Whitewater, Mrs. Clinton, who hasn't given a press conference in the White House decides to do it. What's the strategy here? Why put Mrs. Clinton out in front of the cameras?

Because the questions were about her, and it was her decision. I had very little to do with that. We watched it. We were glad it was happening. But that was done by her and her team.

Did it work?

Sure. A lesson we learned so deeply, but always forgot is that whenever the Clintons went out and actually confronted the questions and answered them for good or bad, people were quite forgiving, tolerant. They just wanted to see the questions addressed.

Toward the end of 1994, polls were starting to come in Republicans are picking up some steam. What's the president's mood?

Denial. Not just the president -- all of us. Actually, he was less in denial than I think a lot of the rest of us were. He knew that a train wreck was coming. He could feel that we were in for a bad run in the elections from the way he was out campaigning. A lot of the rest of us were hoping against hope that maybe the polls won't hold up. Nobody's going to buy this Contract With America. But he could feel that something was happening, and he was right. Nobody knew how bad it would be, though.

At some point here, he starts talking on the side to Dick Morris.

At least a couple times. We didn't know that then. Going into the last month of the election, it was the first time he had brought back Morris. One of the things we did notice was that he was questioning our strategy of taking on the Contract With America, of running on our accomplishments, the big accomplishments. And instead he was saying that we have to build ourselves. We have to build from the little accomplishments up, and build on family and medical leave, things that made a big difference. It was pretty smart. It made sense. Nobody knew exactly where it was coming from.

During this time you write that there were two sides to Clinton. There was a "night Clinton" and a "day Clinton."

That's after the election. Just once in that period, he mentions this guy Dick Morris, who I had never even thought about much before. His name had come up a couple of times in the campaign, because there was this story about how Clinton might have once decked him when they were working together on some governor's race. And a few people spread it around. We had denied it. It had gone away. I hadn't thought of him since then, didn't, didn't think much about him. Once Clinton said, "Yes, I had my friend, Dick Morris do a poll." I didn't think anything of it. But that was the beginning of something that would rock the whole White House.

On Election Day, 1994, what's the president like?

Working, working, working, working. "Who can I call? What can I do?" He was doing radio calls to California all day. He knew the election was going south, and he wanted to do whatever he could to turn it around.

Now, of course, one of the problems in the 1994 election was that in some ways the more Clinton did, the more he hurt himself. He was the issue, in large measure. That was the year when all those ads were morphing Democratic congressmen into Clinton over the course of the ad. Because of the disorganization in the White House, because of the scandals, he had become the issue.

Now, it's also true that he was being punished for the hard fights he had taken on -- the assault weapons ban, bypassing the economic plan which included a tax increase, some Social Security cuts, trying to get health care and failing. They were using his good fights against him and his bad character traits against him at the same time. And it was a real combustible mixture.

How did he take it on election night?

[Long pause] On election night, the honest answer is that I don't know. He was in the White House. Unfortunately, I had become the public face of arguing back the loss. So I was just doing all these interviews and getting humiliated in that way. And I didn't talk to him that night.

How about the next day?

Subdued. Yes. Later on, in the time after, yes. I think coming out of it, in the days and weeks immediately after the election, it was a blow. He used to talk about how he didn't want to become a prime minister. But I think the second half of that sentence is, we all understood that had he been a prime minister, he would have been out of a job after that Election Day. And I think it rocked his confidence. It rocked our confidence. He was trying to figure out what went wrong. He lost confidence in us. And he seemed to be just on kind of a walkabout for several days and weeks afterwards, searching around in a funk, really.

You say he lost confidence in you. Did the president and did Mrs. Clinton blame the 1992 political team -- you guys -- for that loss?

In part, yes, sure. We'd pushed forward, and we didn't win. We didn't come up with the magic formula. We let them down. We misread the election. Not just the 1992 team, but the whole White House operation.

After the, the election, you sneak into the Oval Office to write the president a note. Do you want to tell us that story?

This was immediately after the election in these days when we're trying to figure out how we're going to regroup. We had a trip to Asia. And in the course of that trip, the president gave a press conference where he was going to get asked some domestic questions. In their zeal, the newly elected Republican congress was talking about a constitutional amendment to allow prayer in schools.

And so I was preparing the president for the press conference. We went over that he might get this question. We didn't want to be making news on one of the Republican issues. And I think that was basically the direction I gave. But I said it in a way that did not emphasize that the first thing the president had to say was, "I'm against a constitutional amendment." I said, "You just got to figure out a way to take a pass on it." And whichever words he used to answer it, it sounded like he was opening himself up to accepting a constitutional amendment on school prayer, which fed into all the problems of he doesn't have a backbone. What does he believe in? It was a huge disaster.

I was just blaming myself for that, but also knowing that he had been stewing the whole year about this whole Woodward book, which is massive misjudgment on my part for thinking that we could make this a better story than it was going to turn out to be. And so I took that opportunity just before the president came back, to write him a note, apologizing for the school prayer moment, and then a broader apology for making the misjudgment about Woodward. I closed out with some advice as he's going through all of this re-thinking, basically, "Don't listen to any of us. Do what got you here. Follow your own instincts. Go back to your roots."

And I left this note off. And I remember thinking that I was quite frightened to actually be walking into the Oval Office alone, like even that was doing something wrong. But it was the only way I could figure to get him the note without ten other people seeing it. And I wanted it to be private. So I left it off by his phone. He didn't say anything for several days. And finally he walks into my office one day through the back door and says, "I agree with what you wrote in that letter." And that was basically all he said. So I started thinking, does he agree with the apology or the advice, or does it mean I'm okay or does it mean I'm still in trouble? But it was his way of both acknowledging his anger and saying, "Let's get back to work."

During the transition period . . . was there a tug of war between those of you on the political side and those on the economic team about where the president ought to focus first?

. . . I think the differences were more in degree than in kind. There was no question we had promised through the whole campaign that you had to both reduce the deficit and increase investments in the economy, and education, and all of these other social investments. We also knew by the end of the campaign that there was no way we could meet the letter of the promises on both sides. So you had to make a choice. . . But there was no question that the president knew . . . there had to be significant credible deficit reduction.

Did that disappoint others on this staff who really thought the president ought to focus more on public promises, like the middle-class tax cut, and putting people first?

Sure. Because both the beauty and the horror of the 1992 campaign was there was something in it for everyone. If you believed in the investments, and the putting people first investments, they were there. If you believed in deficit reduction, there was that promise to cut the deficit in half. It turned out that when we actually got into office, doing both was a lot harder than anyone ever imagined.

What were the fights like? Do you remember one in particular?

It was more like an intense seminar than a knockdown, drag-out political fight. People brought their arguments to the table. People brought to the table what they believed the core promises of the campaign were. But everybody knew also that we had tried to do a little bit of everything.

What was Bill Clinton's mood after it became obvious that the Congress was lost, especially the House, in the 1994 elections?

What strikes more was his mood in the days running up to it. He was in kind of a frantic, hyper campaign mode, doing everything possible to get himself out there to be making the case for the Democrats. It turns out that was the absolute worst thing he could have been doing. No one likes to face this, and there were a lot of reasons for the losses in 1994 -- a tax increase, a Social Security tax increase, gun control, a lot of tough votes out there. But what the Republicans were doing that whole year was making it also a referendum on Clinton. Remember the morph ads? They would take the local congressman and turn his face into a picture of Clinton. And so actually the more the president got out there in those final days, the more harm he was probably doing to Democrats. But who can tell him that?

And in those final days before the 1994 elections, he was calling drive-time radio in swing states and contested states trying to send out the message for Democrats. But, obviously, it didn't work. That night he was sequestered up in the residence, and a lot of us were down in a basement office down in the West Wing just seeing the results come in, and hoping against hope that maybe some of the final states would turn our way. We hoped right up until 11:30 that maybe Harris Wofford would pull it out in Pennsylvania. Maybe there'd be a surprise in Minnesota. Maybe someone would hold on. Nobody did.

What was the president's reaction?

Depression. I had never seen him in more of a funk than in those three to four weeks immediately following the campaign. One or two days after the election, he went to Georgetown, and gave a speech which was like a walkabout through the interiors of his mind, and he was throwing out all of these different explanations for what happened. It was part apology, part concession, part defiance, part analytical deconstruction of what possibly could have happened in all of these districts. But the truth was he didn't know what had happened, and didn't really want to face it, and was having a hard time coming to grips with it.

Who did Bill Clinton blame for that loss in 1994?

All of us. He blamed the staff for running a bad campaign, for taking on the Contract for America directly. He blamed the Democrats in Congress for not standing by their votes, he felt, fully enough; he did blame the National Rifle Association. He had a very intricate analysis on how the gun control vote was actually the most harmful to Democrats in those final days leading to the 1994 election. Obviously, it was hard for him at the beginning, to accept some of the blame himself. And I've got to say looking back, from the easy perspective of 2000, I come away believing even more some of our spin of 1994. If you really look back now, the defeat in 1994 was, in large measure, a result of the votes that were made in 1993--a tax increase, a Social Security tax increase, NAFTA, which depressed our base, and those gun votes. And the truth was that the hard votes had been taken, but the positive consequences weren't manifest yet to people. You combine that with all of our very early stumbles, our image problems, gays in the military, a White House too young and too chaotic, and the president's own personal stylistic problems early on, and it's a recipe for disaster.

In the wake of the 1994 elections, there was a bit of a shake-up at the White House.

A bit. [Laughter]

Do you want to talk about that?

No. [Laughter.] Listen, everybody knew something had to happen, but nobody wants to be the one. And in those days in November, December, January, you know something's going to happen. You know there's going to be a change. Some of the shake-up had already happened, anticipating the problems. Leon Panetta had been brought in, in August of 1994, before the election. So at the core of the White House there had already been some changes. It was pretty clear, though, after the election that the president wanted new political advice, and that people who had served him loyally and people like Stan Greenberg, Mandy Grunwald, Paul Begala and other outside political advisers were starting to get frozen out. Some of us inside were feeling the chill, but it was less obvious.

So the political team that had helped him win in 1992 was basically gone in 1994?

Yes. And at some level it's painful, but that's part of the game too. If you lose a big election, you're going to have to pay the price.