Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 10, 1994 TAG: 9404110133
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ANN DEVROY THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Long
But this is Year Two. And there is little to suggest that the wild ride the nation took with Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton in 1993 was a function of first year settling-in. It appears to be a way of life.
Despite endless efforts to tighten the reins and even out the ride, the Clinton White House continues its breathtaking lurches. It remains a place constantly reinventing itself, with new people learning their jobs and three sets of hands at the helm - the president's, the first lady's and sometimes the vice president's. The lines of authority resemble a plate of spaghetti: Everyone seems to be in charge of everyone so that no one is held accountable, there is little hierarchy, and there are loops of influence and access that collide, coincide or work in blissful ignorance of one another until some fiasco looms.
Interviews with several administration officials, direct observation and discussions with outside advisers suggest that it is not that the Clintons like chaos, but that they are unwilling to give up central control because political scientists say that's how the White House should operate. They also are loath to believe the friends they brought to the White House from Arkansas and elsewhere are not always up the jobs they hold.
All evidence suggests that until its final days, this administration will be a public roller-coaster ride, a modern-day ``Perils of Pauline.''
The tedious business of government - what one aide calls the ``back office'' of the White House as compared to the policy initiatives that occupy the front office - is often ignored. There is no serious disciplinarian. Meetings of Clinton's top people, as one official put it, ``could be held in Yankee Stadium'' so many attend.
With two deputy chiefs of staff and three senior aides without portfolios, plus a dozen others with access to the Oval Office and a string of outsiders with full entry, it is difficult to know, even among the staff, who's in charge of what.
Staff turnover has been huge. A sometimes self-defeating compulsion toward privacy, particularly by Hillary Clinton, endures. A web of Byzantine personal and political relations and numerous loops of information and influence all but ensure that collisions await around some, if not many, corners.
That the Clinton team has brushed off some of the boring but necessary tasks of serving in government only to come to grief later is not disputed. The story of the missing White House passes is an illustration.
On Aug. 19, 1993, and again on Oct. 27 and for a third time on Feb. 24, 1994, McLarty was pressed by a congressional committee about rumors that large numbers of the White House staff failed to get clearances to view classified material and to obtain the permanent White House passes that ensure they had thorough background checks.
To each inquiry McLarty responded that the passes and background checks were being handled in a ``timely'' manner just as other administrations had handled them.
Two weeks after the final letter - six months after the issue was first raised - the White House conceded that one-third of the staff had failed to obtain their passes and security clearances, that the man in charge of the clearances, deputy counsel William Kennedy III, had his own nanny tax problem and that some senior officials who did not have the required clearances routinely saw classified material. McLarty finally issued an order telling the 1,004 members of the White House staff to get their pass paperwork done within two weeks or leave.
At almost the same time last month, it was revealed that top White House advisers had met with officials overseeing the Resolution Trust Corp., the independent agency investigating the failure of Arkansas' Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan. Yet, less than a month into the administration, the White House counsel's office had issued a firm set of guidelines banning just those kinds of contacts. Each White House employee receives an ethics briefing with the same caution: Stay away from regulators.
McLarty said the implications of such orders clearly didn't sink in. ``People now are very, very, very aware,'' he said, because ``these events have properly and forcefully communicated'' the results of inattention.
The story of the missing security passes - a minor misstep - and the stories of the contacts with regulators, which produced a dozen subpoenas and loom far larger, illustrate the episodic nature of the Clinton White House. No lessons seem permanently learned.
The lessons of self-defeating secrecy have occurred at a dizzying pace, yet even the release of significantly more information about the Clintons during the past month does not suggest that the White House has adopted a new policy.
Over time, the Clintons have released many of the tax returns and other documents they refused to give up during the presidential campaign and since. Some - like the records of Hillary Clinton's commodities trading career and the corrected version of Whitewater financing - have proved to be politically embarrassing. But many in the White House argue that barring illegal acts, full financial disclosure in a campaign and at the earliest sign of persistent questioning is an unhappy, but inescapable, experience.
Just in the last three months, White House officials have refused to answer many of the Whitewater questions posed by reporters and initially refused to turn over documents to the Justice Department. They then negotiated a subpoena for the documents that ensured they would remain private.
The Clintons refused to accede to a special counsel until Democrats joined the call, and the White House did not disclose that officials had removed Whitewater documents from the office of Vincent Foster, the deputy counsel who committed suicide, until it was discovered by the press.
Hillary Clinton is widely seen in the White House as the major force of resistance to the broad release of information she considers private. And running afoul of the first lady, on issues of secrecy, policy and personnel is considered a ruinous career move. In the Clinton White House, there are Hillary Clinton circles of authority, campaign veteran circles of authority, Friends of Bill circles of authority, Vice President Gore circles and a half-dozen alliances and a dozen back-channel lines as well.
White House counselor David Gergen was asked recently whether he had been pushed outside the loop because he ran into trouble with Hillary Clinton when he argued that the Clintons should disclose more of their personal financial data. ``There are loops and there are loops,'' he answered.
The members of the loops keep changing. In little over a year, one deputy chief of staff, Roy Neel, has left; one, Mark Gearan, moved on to be communications director; two new ones, Philip Lader and Harold Ickes, were added. The personnel director, Bruce Lindsey, turned into a roving adviser; the communications director, George Stephanopoulos, turned into a senior adviser. Republican Gergen was brought in, heavily utilized, then isolated, and now resurrected as part of the Whitewater defense team.
The top three jobs in the counsel's office have changed hands; the legislative shop has changed hands; the scheduling, political affairs and intergovernmental affairs operations have changed hands. The national security team has been reconfigured to add a new secretary of defense, and a team of media advisers is being added at the White House in the national security area. Extensive revamping is said to be going on there at lower levels.
``You and I are accustomed to Republican White Houses where there is a hierarchy, where there is a chain of command, where there are consequences for screwing up and where everyone knows who reports to whom,'' said one Republican familiar with the Clinton operation. ``President Clinton didn't want that kind of White House. And he sure didn't get it.''
That so many advisers have kibitzing rights with Clinton is evidence of the freewheeling Clinton White House. So are the three senior advisers - Stephanopoulos, Gergen and Lindsey - with no line authority. Relatively junior staff members can bend Clinton's ear almost at will because the president is said to like such discussions.
``You want to know what model this White House follows,'' laughed one aide, ``well you aren't going to find it in Presidential Quarterly. You aren't going to find it, period. It's the Bill Clinton model.'
One Clinton administration official put it diplomatically: ``Everyone has a fair amount of responsibility to manage their own departments and areas. It is an in-box style of management where if there is a problem to deal with, each individual manager or person deals with it when it hits the in box, but there is very little overall monitoring by some central authority.''
Gergen, who served in three Republican White Houses, said, ``Democrats have a different concept'' on how to run things. But fundamentally, Gergen said, ``Staffs are a reflection of the desires of the person in the center. The person, this president, likes a staff in which many diverse views are expressed.''
Clinton, McLarty said in an interview, should be judged by his results in legislation and in the state of the nation and the world, not by episodes of trouble. He and Gergen point to last year's budget agreement and approval of the North American Free Trade Agreement, plus lesser successes, as well as the introduction of health-care reform, the work this year on education, crime and other issues as evidence that however messy the Clinton operation looks, it is effective.
But no one disputes that how the White House runs is important. In an era in which the White House has become a complex and central place for the making and execution of policy and the focus of increasingly huge amounts of media attention, the White House operation has been seen as vital to presidential success.
But Clinton, his aides have said, gave significantly less thought to the White House staff than he did the Cabinet. McLarty, in large measure, did not select the staff he oversees, many of whom have relationships with the president or first lady that put them outside of his control.
It is not always easy to figure out what McLarty does. His advocates say that is because one of his major roles is giving private advice to Clinton at difficult times. He brought Gergen into the White House last spring, in another moment of serious Clinton peril, and the two remain allies. Gergen is McLarty's biggest backer, frequently telling those inquiring about McLarty how much the chief of staff has taken charge, how he finds good people and delegates responsibility, the sign of a good manager.
Much of the work of the White House seems to go on without McLarty's direct involvement, which he suggests is the way he planned it. ``Information does flow through my office,'' he said, ``As long as the information is flowing through my office, I know what's going on'' and can intervene if need be.
With each controversy, the question for the White House has been: Who's in charge? The answer has been: on what subject?
The prevailing attitude at the White House is that this period will pass, but that something else will be lurking around the next corner. ``You know the business cycle,'' one official said, ``well, we call it the Clinton cycle. Bad springs, recoveries in the fall.''
by CNB