REPORTERS COVERING what they dubbed the Al Gore 1997 Worldwide Soft Money Refund Tour had just settled into their seats at Qinghua University to hear the vice president speak when they were suddenly summoned back to their makeshift press room. Moments later, one of the more recognizable members of the Clinton administration popped through the door.
“Who are you?” a reporter asked. After a slight pause, he decided to be a senior administration official. As several news organizations later revealed, it was Al Gore himself.
Ever polite and low-key, the veep took issue with an Associated Press dispatch intimating he had wimped out in his talks with the Chinese. The story quoted a senior U.S. diplomat saying the administration wasn’t going to let the strategic relationship with Beijing be derailed because of the alleged Chinese-government connection to the Clinton fund-raising scandals. This wasn’t some vicious leak to embarrass Gore: It came from an official U.S. briefing.
Not so fast, Gore said. In his talks with Li Peng, the double-breasted assassin who masterminded the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, he’d been quite clear. The fund-raising charges were serious, he’d warned, and if they proved true, that could spell big trouble for Sino-American relations. This high- level damage control was too late. Reporters like Gore and usually give him the benefit of the doubt. But this time they chose to believe that the information they already had was just as credible as what they were now hearing.
From start to finish, the messy campaign-finance angle completely overshadowed the serious diplomacy of Gore’s China trip and his creditable behind-the-scenes performance in a tricky diplomatic role. What’s more, this was a largely self-inflicted wound: Before and during the trip, Gore and his operators harmed themselves with a series of needless blunders. According to a senior Clinton aide who admires Gore a lot, “a toxic environment was created that made it impossible for him to succeed from a political standpoint.”
Like most vice presidents, Gore doesn’t draw much press on his travels. This was the first instance in which one of his overseas jaunts attracted anything near the turbocharged media scrutiny of a presidential campaign. It’s early, but Team Gore decisively flunked its first major-league tryout.
Truth is, Gore and his handlers have been shellshocked for weeks. Maybe they’d been lulled into complacency by four years of adoring media coverage. But that coverage changed after Gore and his aides got caught dissembling about what the veep knew — and when he knew it — about the now-famous Buddhist-temple fund-raiser he attended last April. The media meltdown accelerated after Gore’s disastrous press conference last month, in which he tried to explain away phone calls asking fat cats for campaign contributions with legalistic mumbo-jumbo. This trip didn’t exactly turn things around with the press.
The stumbles began even before Air Force Two lifted off to Asia. For weeks, Gore aides had been telling reporters the veep would take a press plane to Asia. The White House Travel Office — the new and definitely not improved version — secured a plane from Rich Air. A week before takeoff, however, 60 Minutes did an expose of the charter firm’s allegedly dubious safety record. For p.r. and safety concerns, Rich Air was history — and the next- best charter deal would have cost reporters $ 26,000 a head. Predictably, the press-plane idea collapsed.
That launched a furious scramble among reporters to get on Gore’s plane. Unable to accommodate everyone, his staff peremptorily changed the seating policy from first-come, first-served to serve the big guys first. Then they lied about what they were doing. Reporters who’d been assured of seats for weeks were told only four press seats were available. Suddenly, there were 10. And they all went to brand-name news organizations, several of which got interested in the trip only after Gore’s press conference. Gore’s handlers were so intent on sucking up to the top guns that the staffer who handled press advance was bumped from the trip to make room for the Los Angeles Times.
The result: A half-dozen reporters, quickly styled “the leper colony,” had to chase Gore as best they could, an impossible task since no commercial airline can possibly duplicate Air Force Two’s leave-when-you-like schedule. Such luminaries as Maureen Dowd of the New York Times missed Gore’s side trips to Xian and Shanghai because they weren’t in the cocoon. Not surprisingly, Dowd stuck it to Gore in her columns.
Gore’s beleaguered press staff tried to make amends. Gore came to dinner one night with the Aand B-teamers and spent over an hour schmoozing off the record. At his press conference in Beijing, he recognized almost every reporter from the leper colony, even calling by name those he’d never met. The havenots were also given some logistical help on the ground from U.S.- embassy and Gore staffers as they schlepped to and from airports. But it was too little, too late — reporters, like politicians, have long memories.
Having ensured that half the press entourage would arrive in Asia grumpy, the Gore brain trust proceeded to irk the favored half as well by closing a preposterous number of events to press coverage. In the current culture of campaign-finance scandal, they were so spooked by the image of Gore meeting with expatriate fat cats that they barred the press from four such meetings. The ridiculous explanation: These were working meetings, sort of like classified National Security Council sessions. To avoid photos of Gore reveling with his human-rights-impaired hosts, U.S. officials also persuaded the normally convivial Chinese to dispense with banquet toasts altogether. Gore used to be a reporter, but you couldn’t tell by bonehead staff calls like these.
The piece de resistance was a botched briefing on Gore’s first day of talks in Beijing by Leon Fuerth, Gore’s national security adviser. Fuerth has been with Gore for 13 years and is highly regarded by his boss. Reporters, however, say he views the media with disdain and has never been helpful to them. Fair or not, that image was compounded by what one reporter who knows him well termed a “belligerently useless” briefing. It didn’t help that Fuerth innocently referred to the press corps as “clutter.” Fuerth brought seven aides along to Asia, but apparently none of them understood an essential truth of media manipulation: First decide what you want the press to write, then give it to them and hope for the best.
Hammered by reporters for something to file, press spokeswoman Ginny Terzano by chance encountered a senior U.S.-embassy official in the lobby of the tony China World Hotel, where the Gore party was staying. She pressed him into coming down to the briefing room to help fill in some blanks for cranky reporters. Not used to the requirements of political spin, the official confirmed the worst-kept secret in Washington and Beijing: Strategic engagement with China is so important that even if the Chinese did try to influence U.S. policy by funneling illegal campaign contributions to members of Congress and the Clinton-Gore reelection, Clinton won’t let that torpedo warmer Sino-American ties. Suddenly, reporters had their lead — the wrong one, by Gore’s reckoning. “They should find a better national security adviser,” said one unsympathetic journalist, “so they don’t have to bring down an honest embassy official.”
As the saying goes, Moses leaned on his staff — then he died. It’s a lifetime until 2000, but the China trip demonstrated that, for now, the Gore team is nowhere near ready for prime time, much less a presidential campaign. Except, perhaps, for the Dole campaign.
Thomas M. DeFrank is Washington bureau chief of the New York Daily News.
