On the day after the election, awash in congratulatory calls and messages, I went to work on what is called the transition. Is it ever! There was no time to celebrate, and we didn’t take much time to rest, which was probably a mistake. In just eleven weeks, my family and I had to make the transition from our life in Arkansas into the White House. There was so much to do: select the cabinet, important subcabinet officials, and the White House staff; work with the Bush people on the mechanics of the move; begin briefings on national security and talk to foreign leaders; reach out to congressional leaders; finalize the economic proposals I would present to Congress; develop a plan to implement my other campaign commitments; deal with a large number of requests for meetings and the desire of many of our campaign workers and major supporters to know as soon as possible whether they would be part of the new administration; and respond to unfolding events. There would be a lot of them in the next seventy days, especially overseas: in Iraq, where Saddam Hussein was seeking relief from UN sanctions; Somalia, where President Bush had dispatched U.S. troops on a humanitarian mission to avert mass starvation; and Russia, where the economy was in shambles, President Yeltsin faced growing opposition from ultra-nationalists and unconverted Communists, and the withdrawal of Russian troops from the Baltic nations had been delayed. The “to do” list was growing.
Several weeks earlier, we had quietly established a transition-planning operation in Little Rock, under a board that included Vernon Jordan, Warren Christopher, Mickey Kantor, former San Antonio mayor Henry Cisneros, Doris Matsui, and former Vermont governor Madeleine Kunin. The staff director was Gerald Stern, who was on leave from his job as executive vice president of Occidental Petroleum. Obviously, we didn’t want to look as if we’d taken the outcome of the election for granted, so the operation was kept low-key, with an unlisted telephone number and no sign on the door of the offices on the thirteenth floor of the Worthen Bank building.
When George Stephanopoulos came over to the mansion on Wednesday, Hillary and I asked him to continue being our communications director in the White House. I would have been happy to have James Carville there too, to help develop strategy and keep us on message, but he didn’t think he was suited to government and two days earlier he had cracked to reporters, “I wouldn’t live in a country whose government would hire me.”
On Wednesday afternoon, I met with the transition board and received my first briefing papers. At 2:30 p.m., I held a short press conference on the back lawn of the Governor’s Mansion. Because President Bush was in another tense situation with Iraq, I emphasized that America “has only one President at a time,” and that “America’s foreign policy remains solely in his hands.”
On my second day as President-elect, I spoke with a few foreign leaders, and went to the office to take care of some state business and thank the governor’s staff for the fine job they had done while I was away. That night we had a party for the campaign staff. I was still so hoarse I could barely squeak out “Thank you.” I spent most of the time shaking hands and walking around with signs on my shirt that said, “Sorry, I can’t talk,” and “You did a good job.”
On Friday, I named Vernon Jordan as chairman and Warren Christopher as director of my transition board. The announcement of their appointments was well received in Washington and in Little Rock, where both were respected by the campaign staff, many of whom were beginning to show predictable and understandable signs of exhaustion, irritability, and anxiety about the future, as the euphoria of our victory wore off.
In the second week of the transition, the pace picked up. I spoke about Middle East peace with Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, and Saudi Arabia’s King Fahd. Vernon and Chris filled out most of the senior transition staff with Alexis Herman, deputy chair of the Democratic Party, and Mark Gearan, who had managed Al Gore’s campaign, as deputy directors; DLC president Al From in domestic policy; Sandy Berger, along with my campaign aide Nancy Soderberg in foreign policy; and Gene Sperling and my old Rhodes classmate Bob Reich, then a Harvard professor and author of several thought-provoking books on the global economy, in economic policy. The vetting of all candidates for important positions would be overseen by Tom Donilon, a sharp Washington lawyer and longtime Democratic activist. Donilon’s job was important; defeating a President’s appointments because of financial or personal problems in their backgrounds or previously unexamined opinions had become a regular part of Washington political life. Our vetters were supposed to make sure that anyone who was willing to serve could survive the scrutiny.
A few days later, former South Carolina governor Dick Riley joined the transition team to oversee the sub- cabinet appointments. Riley had a backbreaking job. At one point, he was getting more than three thousand resumes, as well as a couple of hundred phone calls, a day. Many of the calls were from members of Congress and governors who expected him to return the calls personally. So many people who had contributed to our victory wanted to serve that I was worried about able, deserving people falling through the cracks, and some of them did.
The third week of the transition was devoted to reaching out to Washington. I invited House Speaker Tom Foley, House majority leader Dick Gephardt, and Senate majority leader George Mitchell to Little Rock for dinner and a morning meeting. It was important for me to get off on the right foot with the Democratic leaders. I knew I had to have their support to succeed, and they knew the American people would hold us all accountable for breaking the partisan gridlock in Washington. It would require some compromise on my part and theirs, but after our meetings I was confident we could work together. On Wednesday, I went to Washington for two days to meet with President Bush, other congressional Democrats, and the Republican leaders in Congress. My meeting with the President, scheduled to last an hour, went almost twice that long and was both cordial and helpful. We talked about a wide variety of issues, and I found the President’s review of our foreign policy challenges particularly insightful. From the White House, I drove two miles into north Washington, to a neighborhood beset by poverty, unemployment, drugs, and crime. On Georgia Avenue, I got out of the car and walked for a block, shaking hands and talking to merchants and other citizens about their problems and what I could do to help. Eight people had been killed the previous year within a mile of where I stopped. I got food from a Chinese takeout where the workers operated behind bulletproof glass for safety. Parents of school-aged children said they were frightened because so many of their kids’ classmates brought guns to school. The people who lived in Washington’s inner city were often forgotten by Congress and the White House, despite the fact that the federal government still retained substantial control over the city’s affairs. I wanted the city’s residents to know I cared about their problems and wanted to be a good neighbor.
On Thursday, I went for a morning jog, running out the door of the Hay-Adams Hotel, just across Lafayette Square from the White House, down a street filled with homeless people who had spent the night there, over to the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial, then back to the McDonald’s near the hotel. I got a cup of coffee and met a fifty-nine-year-old man who told me he’d lost his job and everything he had in the recession. I walked back to the hotel thinking about that man, and how I could manage to keep in touch with the problems of people like him from behind the wall that surrounds every President.
Later, after breakfast with fourteen Democratic congressional leaders, I had a private visit with the Senate minority leader, Bob Dole. I had always respected Dole, because of his courageous recovery from his World War II wounds and because he had worked with Democrats on issues like food stamps and disability rights. On the other hand, he was a partisan, and had wasted no time on election night in saying that because I didn’t “even win by a majority… there’s not a clear mandate there.” Therefore, Dole said, his responsibility was “to bring our party together, to reach out to try to attract independent and Perot supporters to put up our own agenda.” Dole and I had a good talk, but I left the meeting unsure of what our relationship, or his agenda, would be. After all, Dole wanted to be President too. I also had a cordial meeting with the House minority leader, Bob Michel, an old-fashioned conservative from Illinois, but I regretted that the Republican whip, Newt Gingrich of Georgia, was away on vacation. Gingrich was the political and intellectual leader of the conservative Republicans in the House, and he believed a permanent Republican majority could be forged by uniting the cultural and religious conservatives with voters who were anti–big government and anti-tax. He had skewered President Bush for signing the Democrats’ deficit-reduction package in 1990 because it contained a gas-tax increase. I could only imagine what he intended to do to me.
Back at the hotel, I met with General Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Having risen to the highest ranks with the support of Presidents Reagan and Bush, Powell would serve his last nine months as chairman under a very different Commander in Chief. He was opposed to my proposal to allow gays to serve in the military, even though during the Gulf War, which made him a popular hero, the Pentagon had knowingly allowed more than one hundred gays to serve, dismissing them only after the conflict, when they were no longer needed. Despite our differences, General Powell made it clear that he would serve as best he could, including giving me his honest
