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John F. Harris
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John F. Harris, national staff writer for the Washington Post, is the author of the recent book, The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House. He covered the Clinton White House from 1995 to 2001 for the Post, earning the White House Correspondents’ Association’s Aldo Beckman Award and the Prize for Distinguished Reporting on the Presidency from the Gerald R. Ford Library for his work during that period. He is also a panelist on PBS’s “Washington Week.”
Paul McLeary: You covered the Clinton presidency for the Washington Post from 1995 to 2001, and during that contentious second term, what was your general take on the mood of the press corps in response to Clinton and his policies?
John F. Harris: The mood of the press corps was oftentimes kind of sour — sour in both directions. People tend to forget, for understandable reasons because the Lewinsky scandal was such a sensational affair, that 1997 was in its own way a very sullen, snippy, disagreeable year in the relationship between the White House and the press. Most news organizations — the Washington Post included — were devoting lots of resources, lots of coverage, to the campaign fund-raising scandal which grew out of the ’96 campaign, and there were a lot of very tantalizing leads in those initial controversies. In the end they didn’t seem to lead anyplace all that great. But there were tons of questions raised that certainly, to my mind, merited aggressive coverage.
The White House was unbelievably resentful — they thought it was much ado about nothing, they thought that this was a scandal-obsessed press corps. Mike McCreary — and he’s a really great guy — even before Lewinsky he was in a really pissy mood and I don’t blame him for him for it, and I don’t doubt that it was unpleasant and that his feelings of resentment were genuine, but he was snapping back at us, angry phone calls and whatnot. From the White House’s vantage point the whole thing was not on the level, they thought this was standard political fund-raising that was undeniably a little sloppy but wasn’t that big a deal, and we were trying to turn it into the next Watergate.
PM: That kind of leads into the next question. You write in your book that Clinton “saw reporters as slackers and bullies” and that reporters viewed him as a “preening apple polisher.” Why do you think Clinton had such a hard time accepting the fact that the press would be critical of him and his policies?
JH: I think most reporters have kind of a detached sensibility about politicians; the ones that we tend to like and relate to are those who can kind of step back and critique their own performance and who can talk about politics in the way that reporters do — analytically, and with an eye toward the fact that this is all performance. Clinton doesn’t view himself that way. There’s nothing detached about him, he’s immersed in his performance. He is dead earnest about his own ambition and sense of purpose, and so anything that questions his motives or looks for political motive — as there almost always is — he just resents it. I think that when the focus was on what he was really doing — he said X but his real agenda was Y — he viscerally reacts against it. I think that’s not an uncommon reaction for politicians to have, but I think a lot of politicians are able to dismiss [press coverage more easily].
I don’t know the Bush White House nearly as well as I knew Clinton’s White House, and I don’t know the president at all, but just from observation it seems to me that Bush is able to pretty well disconnect from it. He doesn’t like his motives being questioned, either, but [he’s not] as reactive as Clinton. Clinton had the worst of both ends; he took the press seriously and did resent it, and yet he also wasn’t able to remove himself from it.
PM: You wrote that since Clinton was the first baby boomer president and many of the reporters were roughly the same age as him, he seemed to feel almost insulted or betrayed that people would write critically of him.
JH: I think there’s truth to that. The Clintons came out of the 60s and in particular I would say the early 70s, and the Watergate experience — remember, Mrs. Clinton worked on the Watergate Committee — thinking “we’re the good guys and the press is supposed to help the good guys.” So when they saw themselves being cast, I would say not as the bad guy, but with scrutiny, they really, really were not prepared for it and really resented it.
I also don’t think you can separate any of this from Whitewater … They were powerfully resentful of it.
PM: How do feel about the performance of the press through the Lewinsky matter and the impeachment process? Has there been any second-guessing among your colleagues as to how the situation was handled?
JH: That’s a hard question for me to answer, because to not have some degree of self-examination really would put me in a light that I don’t want to be in — just sort of complacently validating the press’ role. That’s not my view, or generally even my instinct toward dealing with press criticism. Nor am I especially apologetic. The president of the United States was in the midst of a legal inquiry — that’s news. I’m sympathetic to the notion that maybe he was being asked questions that he shouldn’t have been asked, or that the Paula Jones case wasn’t on the level, or that the Ken Starr case that came out of the Paula Jones case never should have gone forward. Whatever — it did go forward, and it was obvious in a pretty immediate sense that [Clinton] was lying about what was going on. So you’ve got a president who was lying about his affair with a former intern and an independent council investigation brewing at a furious pace and leading to an impeachment — that’s a pretty big damn story. So, yeah, I covered that without apology.
Two things I would add to that. One: It was a drag. I don’t think most people realized — I’m sure I don’t speak for everybody — but I speak for a lot of my colleagues, at least in print, that the whole thing was a drag. We weren’t getting into journalism to cover fellatio. I tend to think our actual source of resentment was really toward Clinton himself. Why does he make such a mess of his life in ways that intersect with his public responsibilities such that here we are, spending the whole year writing about blue dresses?
In the book I think you can see that I try to be pretty fair-minded and report the good and the bad about Clinton’s record for those eight years. But I don’t see how you can talk about this aspect of the presidency, which loomed large for two years, without including the bad.
The other thing I would say about the press, and this also speaks to why it was a drag for the press and public alike, was that it was just so saturating. And that does seem to me like the great paradox of modern media. We have more outlets than ever before and theoretically more diversity than ever before but as a practical matter [that produces] hypersaturation. You would turn on “Nightline” and you’d get Lewinsky; you would turn on C-SPAN which would feature McCreary’s daily briefing which would be dealing with Lewinsky; CNN would have a special report about Lewinsky; flip on Jay Leno and he’d be making a joke about Lewinsky; or pick up the paper and it’s about Lewinsky.
PM: What do you think of Clinton as someone who has very obviously tried to craft his own image? How do you think the existing Clinton stories will help or hurt Hillary in ’08 and after?
JH: My general take on the Clinton presidency and his record is that, as irresponsible as he could be in some contexts, in the policy context at the end of the day — and it was often a long and agonizing day — he usually made responsible policy decisions. In some cases there were lapses; it took a long time to respond to Bosnia, but he did, Rwanda was a failure we now believe but it wasn’t considered much of a possibility at the time. I think his domestic policy record on the major things — deficit reduction, welfare reform and some others — were pretty impressive.
That’s a decent legacy. But he’s a better defensive politician than an offensive politician — that is, when he is defining himself in opposition to other actors, rather than setting the agenda himself. A defensive president is a hard president to put in the top tier of presidents, in my mind … I’m hard pressed to see his eight years make it there.
But what he’s [currently] doing abroad, I think you can consider that consistent with the ideas that he espoused in the presidency. It’s a more upbeat and celebratory notion of how America should relate in the world in an increasingly globalized environment. It’s an upbeat face on the possibilities that exist that I think he sees in implicit opposition to President Bush. Where Bush emphasizes the role of force in the world, Clinton tends to think the most important thing is community and persuasion.
As far as Hillary, I think that forever the two of them are linked and are dependent on one another. If she were to run and become president, that casts his eight years, historically, in quite a different light. Under one scenario you can image it as a kind of a weird, gaudy eight years between two Bush presidencies and, even more importantly, between the Cold War and the War on Terrorism. While those were sensational years in a lot of ways, although evanescent, what did they really amount to? I think you can create another scenario where she gets elected president and unmistakably you have to say, well look, this couple and the ideas they stood for dominated two or even three decades, and there really is such a thing as Clintonism, and that they are the sort of anchor or reference point of what progressives stood for in this generation. And I think that would guarantee a degree of lasting historical import.
Paul McLeary is a former CJR staff writer. Since 2008, he has covered the Pentagon for Foreign Policy, Defense News, Breaking Defense, and other outlets. He is currently a defense reporter for Politico.