ERSKINE BOWLES SHOULD HAVE GONE HOME. Two weeks after he reluctantly agreed to stay through 1998 as White House chief of staff, Bowles was supplanted. He kept the title, but his duties are now performed by Mickey Kantor, the Washington fixer-lawyer and ex-commerce secretary. Kantor was brought in to run both the political and legal sides of the sex-and-perjury scandal. And since these are all the White House is focused on at the moment, and probably will be for months and months, Kantor is the main man. The idea to summon him came from Hillary Rodham Clinton, who wanted someone smart, loyal, and politically cunning to save Bill Clinton’s presidency — and someone whose conversations with the president would be protected by the attorney-client privilege. Now the Clintons and Kantor make all the decisions: king, consort, consigliere, together in the bunker.
The first decision was to come up with a strategy and stick to it. Pre- Kantor, there was chaos at the White House that Bowles — in civilian life, an investment banker from North Carolina — couldn’t contain. The president’s lawyers (David Kendall, Bob Bennett, Charles Ruff) feuded with his political aides (Rahm Emanuel, Doug Sosnik, John Podesta) over what Clinton should say and do. “Bowles is a great peacetime consigliere,” says Democratic strategist Bob Beckel, who’s in touch with the White House. “But this is war, and they needed a wartime consigliere. That’s Kantor.” The scandal broke on January 21, Kantor arrived full-time on January 24, and the strategy was in place by January 27, the day the president delivered his State of the Union address.
The strategy, in White House argot, is “multi-layered.” It has four parts: stress the Clinton agenda, stonewall on scandal information, trash the president’s enemies, and let the press malign Monica Lewinsky, the former White House intern whose affair with the president is at the heart of the scandal. The entire strategy is based on two assumptions. One is that Lewinsky will reach a deal with Ken Starr, the Whitewater independent counsel, and testify that her relationship with Clinton was sexual, contrary to Clinton’s denial. Whether she’ll accuse Clinton of urging her to lie under oath about the affair is unclear (even to Starr). The second assumption is that Starr will wind up with a weak case. So long as eyewitnesses declaring they saw Clinton and Lewinsky in the heat of passion don’t materialize, Starr won’t have sufficient grounds to recommend impeaching the president. That’s what Kantor and the Clintons believe anyway, and they’re probably right.
For all his troubles, Clinton is a lucky guy. The timing of the State of the Union, six days after the scandal broke, allowed him to implement part one of the strategy instantly and before a national TV audience. He concentrated solely on touting a balanced budget, saving Social Security, spending more on domestic programs, and warning Saddam Hussein. The next day, he drew surprisingly warm crowds in Illinois and Wisconsin. His poll numbers, rather than tank, soared. The problem for the White House staff now is coming up with enough high-profile events, photo ops, policy statements, legislative initiatives, speeches, and trips to keep the White House press busy and to provide non-scandal fodder for the public. President Nixon tried this during Watergate, and it didn’t work. At least in the short run, it has worked for Clinton.
Part two is all the more Nixonian: Say nothing. Under the Kantor regime, the White House quickly got good at this. The president’s men claim they have an alternative storyline to Lewinsky’s taped tale of sex and perjury. In other words, there’s an innocent explanation. But they won’t unveil it until they know the details of Lewinsky’s account of her relationship with Clinton. Even then, the president will offer his own account only if he must in order to survive as president. Obviously, his refusal to talk now about Lewinsky diminishes the credibility of anything he says later. But Kantor and the Clintons are willing to live with this.
The spearhead of part three is Hillary Clinton. Aides weren’t kidding when they said she’s in “battle mode.” Her appearances on two morning TV shows were critical. Only Hillary — not some White House functionary or lawyer — would draw maximum media attention and thus inject into the national bloodstream the notion of Starr as a partisan attack dog and the scandal as the product of a “vast right-wing conspiracy.” It worked, while also stirring the Democratic faithful and shifting the spotlight to other subjects besides Bill and Monica. As preposterous as Hillary’s charges were, the media treated them respectfully and scarcely mentioned the gaping holes in her story. The biggest hole was her insistence the president, she, Clinton ally Vernon Jordan, and other Clintonites aren’t allowed to give their side of the story in public during an investigation. “That’s the way the system works,” she told Lisa McRee of ABC’s Good Morning, America. Of course, that’s not the way it works. Grand jurors and prosecutors can’t talk, but witnesses are free to, and so is everyone else.
The last element of the strategy involves Lewinsky. The White House figures the press will give her a full frisk. Indeed, that’s begun. Unfavorable information about her is pouring out. The White House believes it would backfire if Clintonites zinged her, perhaps transforming her into an abused and sympathetic figure. That’s the last thing Clinton wants. Still, if Lewinsky truly threatens the presidency, the Clinton camp is prepared to assail her as vigorously as it has attacked Starr. But the time for that hasn’t yet arrived.
Credit (or blame) Kantor for all this. His strategy, concocted with the Clintons, has stabilized the president’s situation. Kantor, 58, who was trade representative and commerce secretary in Clinton’s first term, is skilled at coping with scandal. He helped Clinton deal successfully, if dishonestly, with Gennifer Flowers in 1992. More recently, he found consulting work for Webb Hubbell, the Clinton friend who was convicted of overcharging the government with his legal fees. Starr thinks the help Clinton loyalists like Kantor gave Hubbell amounted to hush money. Kantor says he merely came to the aid of a friend in trouble. Now, he’s at it again, performing cynically but better than anyone else in Clinton’s orbit.
Fred Barnes is executive editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
