Are we to believe this story? It could, of course, just be Morris’s vast ego talking. The disgraced consultant claims he was able to reconstruct his private conversations with the president from memory. During these talks, it often appears that Morris was busy running the president’s re-election campaign as well as much of the federal government. On the other hand, Clinton, ever eager to please, does worry deeply about his historic standing. And no one doubts that the president got a lot of advice from Morris, right up to the day, during the Democratic National Convention, when a supermarket tabloid revealed that his chief political adviser had been consorting with a call girl.
So it goes in Morris’s $2.5 million Random House memoir, which appears in bookstores this week. The book will be dismissed as self-serving, and it certainly is. Morris’s grandiosity begins with his justification for writing a memoir that betrays the president’s confidences. In his introduction, he quotes Clinton saying, " “I realize that our relationship is a subject of legitimate historical interest. It’s probably unique in American history’.” A White House spokesman, eager to dismiss the book, said that parts are “wrong, factually off.” But he added that the president found it “interesting” and that “some of it provides insights.”
The most intriguing insights are into Clinton’s character. The president’s temper surfaces repeatedly. “The president, red faced, turned towards me, jabbed me with his forefinger, and yelled . . . " begins a typical passage. Clinton is constantly exploding about the press. Reporters " “love to destroy people. That’s how they get their rocks off’,” he tells Morris. During the election, Clinton also seethes that Bob Dole is " “evil, an eee-vvv-illl, eee-vvv-illl man’.” (A spokesman for Clinton denied the remark about Dole.)
Morris also captures a less-well-known side of Clinton, the oddly passive figure who “made himself elusive. At meetings [the president] would often say nothing. Nothing. He would let others talk, keep a poker face . . . He trusted no one.” Clinton is famously energetic, but Morris reveals a personal cost. “I estimate that during the period I worked closely with the president, he was exhausted, seriously depleted, and sometimes even ill about one quarter of the time.” Morris describes Clinton as “drowning in information . . . immobilized by the mass of material he consumes, rather than empowered by it.” Lucky thing, then, that Clinton had Morris at his side to “focus on the big picture.”
The two men share a love of secrecy. When Clinton began meeting with Morris after the 1994 GOP sweep, the president kept his old friend’s identity concealed from the rest of his staff; the consultant would sneak into the White House like an illicit lover. Morris describes Clinton “whispering” to him over the phone so that others in the Oval Office wouldn’t hear. And Morris compares himself to Charlotte BrontE’s Jane Eyre–and Clinton to her mysterious inamorato, Rochester. “I like subterfuge,” Clinton tells Morris. “That’s why I like you.” Embarrassed, Clinton hastily adds, “One of the reasons.”
A more prosaic reason is a shared fascination with political polling. Morris and Clinton spend hours obsessing over the numbers. “He consults polls as if they were giant windsocks that tell him which way the wind is blowing,” Morris writes. Led by Morris, the president’s political team polls on everything, right down to where Clinton should spend his summer vacation. Martha’s Vineyard is deemed too elitist; Clinton should head for the mountains because “camping out was a favorite for swing voters.” Clinton dutifully obliges, though he draws the line when Morris objects to golf (“a Dole-voter activity,” the consultant informs the president).
Somewhat defensively, Morris asserts that Clinton uses polls only to help him sell his policies, not to shape them. Clinton does not “flip flop,” says Morris: he merely “zig-zags” toward his goal, like a sailboat tacking upwind. Morris himself refuses to be called a “spin doctor.” He is concerned with “issues, not images.” Readers may be unconvinced. Morris’s very first advice to Clinton is to sell the invasion of Haiti as a quest for “human rights and values”–even though the real reason Clinton wants to invade the island, Morris discloses, is to stop an exodus of Haitian immigrants from flooding Florida–a key swing state.
“It’s not the spin, it’s the substance,” insists Morris. No matter. Morris is there to save the president from " “the children who got me elected’,” as Clinton derisively describes his own staff. Morris casts himself as a savant among idiots. When Colin Powell, whose possible presidential candidacy Clinton regards “with terror,” decides not to run in November 1995, Morris declares that “the election is now over.” He tells the president, “Congratulations, you won.” The prediction, delivered 12 months before Election Day, is greeted with “astonished silence, then derisive laughter” from the other staffers in the room. Only Clinton remains silent, “having calculated that I was probably right.”
Morris is supposed to be concerned with domestic politics, but that doesn’t stop him from jumping into foreign affairs. Avoiding the “evil-rodent look” flashed by national-security adviser Tony Lake as they pass in the hall, Morris creates a back channel to key aides. He quotes the architect of the Bosnia peace accords, Richard Holbrooke, as declaring that without Morris’s help, " “I would never have been able to get it done’.”
At about this point (page 262), readers may–if they haven’t already–hurl the book across the room. It’s not that Morris fails to acknowledge his ego. Indeed, he blames it for his unfortunate decision to take up with a prostitute. It’s just that, for all Morris’s frequent allusions to psychological insight (he even names his therapist), he seems unable to see himself very clearly. After he married Eileen McGann in 1977, he writes, “I changed from a Spartan to an Athenian.” Come again? The next sentence explains: “I wore suits, blow dried my hair, and began to feel my anger subsiding.” (McGann, to whom the book is dedicated, has announced that she is filing for divorce.)
Morris is careful not to dish any real dirt on the Clintons. “Those who look in this book in search of illumination of the Whitewater, FBI-file, travel-office, Paula Jones, Gennifer Flowers and other Clinton-era scandals will find none. I’m not holding anything back. I just don’t know anything,” he declares. Well, maybe. Or maybe Morris would like to be invited back. He describes a somewhat pitiful call to Clinton over a month after his departure from the campaign. He leaves a message begging Clinton to call because he is “in a bad way.” Perhaps out of friendship, possibly out of awareness that Morris is writing a book about him, Clinton does call. He tells Morris, " “There’s nothing you have done to make me angry. I feel gratitude and affection, not anger’.” Morris brightens. “I think our relationship has developed a new dimension, and I so desperately want it continued.” The president’s response, according to Morris, is: " “You can. It will. I will give you access to me all the time’.” The White House insisted last week that Morris has no “formal or informal role as a political adviser” to the president. But if Clinton gets in trouble again, there could be a sequel.
