Original subtitles

Ladies and gentlemen,

the president of the United States of America,

William Jefferson Clinton.

On a crisp January morning in 1993,

Bill Clinton took the oath of office

as the 42nd president of the United States.

Promising a new start,

he sounded the themes of change and optimism

that had won him the White House.

Our democracy must be not only the envy of the world,

but the engine of our own renewal.

There is nothing wrong with America

that cannot be cured by what is right with America.

He did have heroic visions of what he might do as president.

He felt that the winds of change were blowing heavily at his back

and that he could ride them to great, magnificent victories.

The harder reality was that he only won with 43% of the vote

in a three-man race,

and that's not exactly a heady mandate for governing.

Clinton's victory had come despite a deep divide

in the country.

Millions had responded to his campaign message of change.

But millions of others feared where the country was heading

and did not trust their inexperienced new president

to lead them through uncertain times.

There was a group of people

who had a visceral dislike for Bill Clinton.

They felt that he had stayed just one step ahead of the posse

with his personal problems.

They thought that he represented a 1960s generation

that was always trying to pull a fast one

and not playing by traditional rules.

They despised him and thought there was something illegitimate

about his presidency.

There's a sense of him being a used car salesman.

There's a sense of guy being a charming hick.

He was loathed because, in the first place,

I think we've all known somebody like Bill Clinton

and we don't want them to be president of our country.

And the wife was terrifying as well.

She was pushy, she was humorless,

she couldn't get her hair figured out.

There were just so many things about Hillary

that we didn't like.

Despite all their education and experience,

the Clintons were unprepared for their reception in Washington.

MIKE McCURRY: He still labored under the assumption

that he could bring people together

through power of persuasion.

It was stunning to him

that Republicans would just very blatantly tell him,

"We're not here to cooperate with you

"and this is going to be open warfare

from the very beginning."

It's a big leap, from the state capital to the nation's capital

and to the world's capital,

and the Clintons found that Washington was a shock for them.

The rules were very different, people weren't as friendly,

people had other agendas, a lot of knives were out,

people played behind curtains, you just never knew

what was going to come out and strike you.

90 seconds.

Is there a teleprompter?

What are we going to do about the teleprompter?

He had no comprehension of the rules of the road in Washington.

No governor ever elected to the presidency

has ever understood what they were getting into.

And he looked more unprepared than most.

Wait a minute, how long are you going to have to...

His first address from the Oval Office, sitting behind the desk,

it looked like a big mistake had happened

and some little kid had been allowed in there

with his $12 digital watch.

Everything about him suggested he was not up to this.

Clinton ran his White House

as if it were an extension of the campaign,

filling his staff with 30-year-olds

with little Washington experience.

He wanted to be part of the hurly-burly,

to hear every opinion, weigh in on every decision.

The atmosphere in the White House

in that first year was chaos.

He wanted to do everything.

He wanted to deal with every problem.

He was in the middle of every conflict.

They would have these college bull sessions

that would go on, you know, late into the night.

The meetings were endless,

especially if Clinton was in the meeting,

it would go on and on and on.

He was often thinking out loud, making decisions on the fly,

making a decision tentatively at midnight

and then waking up the next morning and saying,

"Let's rethink this."

The West Wing was littered with pizza boxes and Coke cans,

as staffers wandered freely in and out of meetings.

It wasn't the kind of orderly process

that Republicans brought to the table.

It was all these discordant voices, informal voices,

people who didn't even wear ties and jackets

when they went into the Oval Office, my God!

You've got to be a little grand.

Because the American people want it.

It's the biggest job in the world,

and I think we underestimated that.

People felt like, "What is it, a fraternity house over there?"

As Clinton took office in the winter of 1993,

the economic crisis that had propelled him into office

showed few signs of abating.

We had had a recession.

We had high unemployment.

And it was a lot of uncertainty about whether the United States

was going to get on its feet again

or whether we could be in for a long period

of real difficulty.

So he came into a very difficult environment.

During the transition, Clinton had promised

to focus on the economy "like a laser beam."

But he quickly discovered how easily

his focus could be deflected

by an unscripted comment to a reporter.

Do you intend to keep your commitment

to lift the ban on gays in the military?

Yes.

I want to... I have...

you know what my issue on this is:

number one, we've got a study that says that a lot of gays

have performed with great distinction in the military.

I don't think status alone

in the absence of some destructive behavior

should disqualify people.

Now, Bill Clinton, with his wits about him, would have said,

"Oh, yes, I'm going to stick to my campaign pledge

"and in furtherance of that,

"we're going to appoint a blue-ribbon commission

that will report back to my successor 100 years from now."

But he didn't.

He just said the first part.

You know, "I'm going to keep my campaign pledge."

And all of a sudden, the laser-like focus on the economy

was derailed to a, you know, a lurid issue

in the minds of many people.

Mr. President, would you consider backing down

on your... the ban on gays in the military?

We haven't... we're not here to discuss that.

We're here to discuss the economy,

which is all I discussed yesterday

with congressional leadership, contrary to the press reports.

But would you consider...

We're here to discuss the economy.

Trapped by his own promise,

Clinton attempted to lift the ban,

but ran into heavy resistance from two allies:

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Colin Powell

and Democratic senator Sam Nunn.

So, you have the military leadership bucking him,

the Democratic congressional leaders, led by, you know,

chairman of the Armed Services Committee saying no,

and the president is powerless to do anything about it.

And so he's now put into a position

where he has to try to negotiate

some kind of a resolution to this that will save face.

Therefore, the practice, now six months old...

After weeks of fruitless wrangling,

Clinton announced a compromise... "Don't Ask, Don't Tell"...

That few could even understand.

An open statement by a service member

that he or she is a homosexual

will create a rebuttable presumption

that he or she intends to engage in prohibited conduct,

but the service member will be given an opportunity

to refute that presumption.

Nobody was particularly happy with "Don't Ask, Don't Tell,"

but it was the best that you could do to get it off the table

so you could move on.

Other capitulations quickly followed.

He dropped a stimulus bill and campaign finance reform

in the face of congressional opposition.

It became very apparent very soon

that Bill Clinton as president was not going to be an LBJ.

He was not going to assert his authority, make deals,

crack heads, push his weight around,

say to any members of Congress in the leadership that,

"If you don't follow me, you're going to pay for this,

"because I'm going to remember it.

You're not going to get this, you're not going to get that."

You know, LBJ knew how to use power.

Bill Clinton knew much of that, but he also wanted to be liked.

When attorney general nominee Zoe Baird got into hot water

over her failure to pay taxes for household help,

Clinton hardly put up a fight.

The first day I was in the White House, the president said to me,

"We're having problems with Zoe Baird."

To me this is a big deal, personally,

and I suspect it is to a lot of Americans...

He says, "Well, I'm hearing from Democratic senators

"that it's really going to be a problem,

and the press is on my back."

My position was, "Look, you've already nominated her,

she's an excellent person, we should stick with Zoe Baird."

And he decided no.

I feel very badly about it, but I'm responsible for it

and I'm going to start this afternoon

looking for an attorney general.

In order to placate the opposing party's criticisms

and media criticisms, which began on day one,

the Clinton administration kept folding, kept giving in.

I think that undermined his presidency.

It showed he could be rolled.

The media, which had embraced Clinton during the campaign,

now began to turn on him.

When his nomination of Judge Ruth Bader Ginsberg

to the Supreme Court took a tortuous course,

reporters pounced.

Your turn late, it seems, to Judge Ginsberg

may have created an impression, perhaps unfair,

of a certain zigzag quality

in the decision-making process here.

I wonder, sir, if you could kind of walk us through it,

perhaps disabuse us of any notion

we might have along those lines.

Thank you.

I have long since given up the thought

that I could disabuse some of you

of turning any substantive decision

into anything but political process.

How you could ask a question like that

after the statement she just made is beyond me.

What he wanted people to do, "Just look at the result.

Did I make a good decision or not?"

But as president, every decision that Bill Clinton makes,

and not just the decisions but how he makes these decisions,

is receiving merciless scrutiny.

The messiness of the process became part of the story

and Bill Clinton found it maddening.

The Clintons arrived in Washington

in the midst of a media revolution.

The advent of cable television and the 24-hour news cycle

created an insatiable appetite

for colorful coverage of Washington.

Cable television was beginning to become a force.

And the competition among cable news

became a vicious fact of Bill Clinton's life.

Sex sold.

Corruption sold.

Throughout the spring of 1993, a series of scandals,

including "Travelgate" and "Hairgate," flared in the press.

Hillary found it hard to shrug off the negative press.

Stories, like the one alleging that she broke a lamp

during a heated argument with the president,

embarrassed and humiliated her.

"I've always believed in a zone of privacy," she said,

"but I guess I've been rezoned."

She had an agenda, changes in the country, in the world,

that she wanted to see done.

She couldn't understand why the media

was focusing constantly on their private life.

But the more she fought it, the more she drew attention to it.

The lawyer chosen to lead the Clintons' defense

was their close friend and deputy White House counsel

Vince Foster.

Vince, he got very upset with the attacks.

He felt we couldn't stop these attacks,

and yes, no, we couldn't stop these attacks.

You know, this is the nature of the game down here.

This is the partisan game down here.

And I kept trying to calm him down.

But I did see him getting sadder and sadder.

And then... then that day came when he took his own life.

On the afternoon of July 20, Vince Foster told an assistant

that he was going out for a few minutes.

That evening, his body was found in a secluded park

ten miles from the White House, a bullet hole through his head.

A torn-up note was found a few days later

at the bottom of Foster's briefcase.

"I was not meant for the job

or the spotlight of public life in Washington," it read.

"Here, ruining people is considered sport."

I was very concerned

that, knowing how close Vince Foster was

to both Bill and Hillary,

that it would be sort of the final straw

for Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton in Washington.

They would just think, "This town's impossible."

You know, "We've lost one of our best friends.

He's taken his life in the midst of this melee."

That something very intangible would be lost.

Bill Clinton's one of the most resilient people I've ever met.

The pain goes deeper with Hillary,

and it can stay there longer.

She's strong, but she's also vulnerable.

Far from destroying the Clintons,

Foster's death steeled them against their adversaries.

For Hillary, there could be no more illusions:

this would be a war with only one winner.

They were toughening up by this time.

They were seeing now that we're in a blood sport,

that people are trying to kill you

and nothing is going to make them happy.

Foster's suicide only fueled

the media's fascination with scandal.

Within days of the discovery of his body,

there was speculation about the "real cause" of his death.

The immediate reaction to Vince Foster's death was,

"What happened here, and were the Clintons involved?

Were they covering something up?"

There begins bubbling up this notion

that there's a conspiracy, that Vince Foster's been murdered.

You know, on one account, his body rolled up in a rug,

he's having an affair with Hillary...

All of these terrible things.

Attention focused mostly on some files

mysteriously removed from Foster's office after his death,

including documents related to an old Arkansas land deal:

Whitewater.

Whitewater... the scandal that would haunt Clinton's presidency

longer than any other... Had its roots in the late 1970s.

At the time, Bill Clinton was a young attorney general

making just over $25,000 a year.

Hillary, an associate at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock,

was the family's main breadwinner.

When an old friend named Jim McDougal approached her

with a plan to build vacation homes along the White River,

Hillary decided to invest.

Here's a guy, McDougal, that comes to him and says,

"Put a little money into this thing."

He said, "Boy, you'll be rich and you'll make money,

and this is going to be great."

Well, I guess in hindsight,

every person promoting any sort of land scheme

thinks it's going to be a world-beater

and we're going to be rich as Midas by the time it's over.

Like many of McDougal's real estate projects,

Whitewater went belly-up.

To prop up his scheme,

he made illegal transfers from his own savings and loan,

Madison Guaranty.

McDougal was charged with fraud.

President Clinton, you just mentioned James McDougal,

your former business partner.

A lot of questions have been raised

about his business practices.

Fifteen years later, President Clinton was asked by reporters

what he and Hillary knew about McDougal's illegal activities.

To the best of my knowledge,

he was honest in his dealings with me,

and that's all I can comment on.

The White House was totally unprepared for it.

There was no memo on it, there was no defense group.

I had nothing to do with the management of Whitewater.

Hillary had nothing to do with it.

We didn't keep the books or the records.

There were some of us who said,

"Keep the walls up, keep it back," you know.

"It's none of their business, uh, nothing happened.

"It's a little deal down in Arkansas

that has nothing to do with the presidency, and it'll go away."

It didn't go away, but that built up a suspicion,

and as new things leaked out,

as inconsequential as they might be,

the press would say,

"Oh, the Clintons have been hiding stuff."

And there was built up relatively quickly

that the Clintons were just stonewalling.

The emergence of the Whitewater scandal

couldn't have come at a worse time for President Clinton.

In the late summer of 1993, he needed broad political support,

as his first major piece of legislation...

The federal budget...

Was headed for a showdown in Congress.

We knew that if Bill Clinton lost that vote,

the signal would be, he can't get the Democrats in the House

and the Senate to go along with him.

That means he doesn't have power.

That's the definition of lacking power.

And if this early in the administration

our new president lacks power, where do we go next?

Abandoning his campaign promise to cut taxes

and invest in the middle class, Clinton instead took the advice

of the administration's deficit hawks

to reduce spending and raise taxes.

Bill Clinton's first big decision

was an intellectual act of faith.

We're on the eve of historic action.

Without deficit reduction,

we can't have sustained economic growth.

He gambled in the midst of a recession

that he'd get more economic growth

if he was fiscally conservative,

and if he began to reduce the deficit

that would convince the bond market

to start reducing interest rates

and the economy would grow.

That was just a theory.

No one knew it would work.

More than anything,

Clinton had wanted to invest in the middle class.

The realization that he couldn't left him deeply disappointed.

He didn't become president to say no.

He didn't become president to administer pain.

He didn't become president

because he wanted to placate Wall Street.

But, in fact,

his agenda did require, to some extent, doing all those things.

As the budget reached Congress,

Clinton knew it was on a knife-edge.

With Republicans unanimously opposed,

the president needed nearly every Democratic vote

to pass the bill, but the party,

like the administration, was in disarray.

Liberal Democrats complained about the cuts in spending,

while conservatives opposed the tax hikes.

I think that the president will fail,

the party will fail,

and the country will fail if we enact this budget.

Faced with the possibility of a catastrophic defeat,

Clinton got down to work.

"I knew if I didn't get the economy going," he said,

"nothing else would matter."

There wasn't anything he wasn't willing to do.

He would call, he would meet.

He would grovel, he would strong-arm.

He would use every tactic any leader has at his disposal

to try to get this thing done.

But the days when a president could command votes,

even from members of his own party, were long over.

Bill Clinton was used to Arkansas.

You know, he knew the good old boys,

he knew who he had to go to.

He could walk on the floor of the legislature

and basically, you know, with a smile and a pat on the back

he could get any vote he wanted.

That wasn't true, here in Washington.

And in many ways it was frustrating for him

because he really felt

that he knew what was best for the country

and that by the sheer power of his personality

and his words and his smile,

that somehow he could make it work.

The budget wended its way

through a series of committee and floor votes

in the House and Senate.

We went to some of these votes not having the votes.

Getting calls during the voting process that someone had turned,

someone had moved, these things are being won by one vote.

Imagine that.

This is the budget, this is like his entire presidency

goes down if he fails,

and you're up to one vote each time.

In early August,

the final budget bill reached the floor of the House.

With the vote still in doubt,

all eyes turned to a freshman Democrat

from an historically Republican district,

Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky.

We had her down as voting yes,

and she votes no early on.

And so we said,

"Go in there, find out what the hell's going on,

try to turn her vote around."

First of all, as a former member,

if you're going to vote against the leadership,

vote and get the hell out of there.

She didn't do that, she stayed there.

So suddenly these guys are all pouring on her,

and she's standing there, and they're saying,

"Come on, you've got to change your vote.

This is important to the administration."

She then says something like,

"I'll do this, but the president has to come into my district."

So they call me, back in the office, and they say,

"Will the president come into her district to do..."

And I said, "Absolutely!

Whatever it takes, we're going to do it."

With the vote and his presidency on the line,

Clinton paced nervously in a small office in the West Wing.

We're all crowded around this little television set,

really with quite a high level of uncertainty.

Finally, Mezvinsky cast her vote "yes," and the budget passed.

With an equally narrow victory in the Senate,

Clinton's final budget became law.

Not even he foresaw the economic boom it would set off.

It contributed enormously to what turned out to be

the longest economic expansion in the nation's history.

22 million new jobs were created, productivity went up.

Incomes rose at all levels.

And, for the first time in 30 years, we had a federal surplus.

By the fall of 1993, there were glimmers of a turnaround

in Clinton's fortunes.

After passing his budget,

Congress approved the North American Free Trade Agreement

with overwhelming Republican support.

The same month, he signed the Brady Bill,

instituting background checks for anyone purchasing a firearm.

NAFTA and Brady culminated ten months

of intense focus on domestic affairs,

but beyond America's shores,

a troubled world would wait no longer

for the president's attention.

The Cold War had kept a lot of tensions quiet

and a lot of groups quiet.

And now, with that over,

all of the old animosities, all of the old hatreds...

Ethnic hatreds, regional tensions that had been

under that iceberg of the Cold War...

Were now popping out and were real problems.

How much did the United States want to get involved in problems

in the rest of the world, which tended to be localized problems?

Were those worthy of our time and attention?

This was uncharted territory.

We were all reaching for,

all searching for some new grand unifying theory.

Give us a new way of looking at the world.

Clinton had little to offer in the realm of foreign affairs.

The first president since World War II

who had not worn a military uniform,

he lacked confidence as a commander-in-chief.

Clinton came to the White House

with very little knowledge of the U.S. military.

Famously, he didn't even know how to salute.

To a great many people in this country,

that was legitimately something to be worried about.

Clinton's first major foreign policy crisis

came in the African nation of Somalia,

where a warlord named Mohamed Farah Aidid

was terrorizing the local population

in an effort to suppress his opponents in a civil war.

Clinton inserted U.S. Special Forces into Somalia

to capture Aidid.

During a mission on October 3,

two Blackhawk helicopters were shot down.

American forces sent in to assist

were pinned down by overwhelming firepower.

Before they could be extracted,

18 U.S. soldiers were killed with 84 more wounded.

Around the world, images of a dead American soldier

being dragged through the streets enflamed public opinion.

Although George H.W. Bush had initiated that intervention,

it had expanded on Bill Clinton's watch.

So when things turned bad, it was hugely unpopular,

and Bill Clinton bore the brunt of that.

You need to understand the average citizen.

In their minds, we have gone there on a humanitarian mission

to offer a helping hand, and we get attacked and humiliated.

"Why are we there?

"Why should we continue to help?

"Why are you keeping the boys there?

Bring the boys home."

That sort of political pressure

that President Clinton and his team had to deal with.

The backlash in public opinion

contained what seemed a clear lesson for the young president:

military intervention, without a compelling national interest,

came with unforeseeable risks and costs.

It sent a chill through the administration

and made them much more reluctant to intervene

in other parts of the world.

And where that came home in the most profound way,

and one that Bill Clinton came to deeply, deeply regret,

was in Rwanda.

Rwanda, an African nation

a thousand miles to the west of Somalia,

was suffering through its own civil war between two tribes,

Hutus and Tutsis.

In early April 1994, the Rwandan president's plane was shot down.

The Hutu government blamed Tutsi rebels.

When the plane was shot down,

all hell broke loose,

and that became the trigger which set off this mass killing.

The killing caught the Clinton administration

entirely by surprise.

That night, I was leaving the office and I noticed on CNN,

on the television screen there was shooting going on.

And I, and I said to my assistant, "What's going on?

What is that?"

He said, "Oh, it's a, it's a, it's 'R-wanda.'

There's some kind of operation going on over there."

I said, "Is that real? Is that on time?"

He said, "Yes, sir."

Ultimately, some 800,000 Tutsis would be killed.

But with the Black Hawk Down incident still fresh,

the Clinton administration did virtually nothing

to stop the slaughter.

We needed international support in Rwanda,

but the will to intervene was not there.

They knew what was happening,

but they were not about to take the risks.

Rwanda lived in the shadow of Somalia

and paid the price for what had happened in Somalia.

Clinton's foreign policy

was trapped in a kind of no-man's-land.

If Somalia had demonstrated the risks of military intervention,

Rwanda proved the costs of doing nothing.

I know the president felt awful afterwards.

Awful.

As it came out and we understood the scale,

the enormity, we realized that there are sins of omission

as well as sins of commission.

This was a horrible omission.

Here we go.

All right, flip it, Chelsea.

Battered by a year Hillary described as "hellish,"

the Clintons were looking forward

to their first Christmas in Washington.

Escaping the White House,

they visited close friends and even shopped at a local mall.

Bill and Hillary had always been doting parents to Chelsea,

trying to keep her life as normal as possible.

Both Hillary and Bill, in their own way, were fabulous parents,

very protective of Chelsea,

and managed to keep a cordon of privacy around her,

let her grow up more or less naturally.

For the most part, the press respected Chelsea's privacy,

but showed no such consideration for her parents.

In mid-December,

the first family's hopes for a quiet Christmas were dashed

when a call from the Washington Post

once again plunged them into the roiling currents

of the Whitewater scandal.

I got a call from Bob Kaiser,

who was then the number two editor at the Washington Post.

And he said,

"David, you know, we've known each other a long time,

"and we've made numerous requests to the White House

"for some Whitewater-related documents,

"that we're getting stonewalled,

and we're about to go on the attack."

Many on his staff counseled the president

to turn over his private papers on Whitewater to the Post.

I said, "Mr. President, this is a flagship newspaper.

"They're going to put a team of investigative reporters on this

"if you don't give these documents over

"and no one, no one knows where that's going to go.

"Why don't we just do it now

and just, you know, do the fair and square thing?"

He said, "I agree, let's do it."

He said, "But there's one problem."

He said, "I'm in this with Hillary.

You've got to go convince Hillary."

Hillary's attitude toward the press,

and thus towards the Washington Post,

was to pull back, to reveal nothing,

to keep the media or anybody else

who's asked questions about their inside life at bay.

So she's locked down.

Finally, after about two weeks,

I got a call from the counsel's office saying,

"By the way, David, "we have now sent a letter

to the Washington Post and we'll read it to you."

And I said, "Fine, let me hear the letter."

And basically it said:

"Dear Washington Post, screw you.

No documents."

Clinton's refusal to turn over his private Whitewater records

was a red flag to many of his political enemies.

In early January, Republican senator Robert Dole

demanded the appointment of a special prosecutor

to investigate Whitewater.

If there's nothing to hide, why not lay it all out there?

But every day there's another little drip

coming from somewhere.

Dole's demand reignited the argument inside the White House.

Most of Clinton's advisors

urged him to appoint a special prosecutor,

but Hillary and White House counsel Bernie Nussbaum

argued against it.

I said to the president, "They'll investigate you

"and they won't find anything

"they will try to find that person.

"Then they will try to get that person, to save their neck,

"to remember something that you did in Arkansas

"in the last 20 years which was illegal.

"This will last, Mr. President,

as long as you're president"

"We're trying to run a presidency

"and a White House here.

"This is not going to go away.

"Yes, you can stave it off for a while,

but at some point, everything is going to come out."

And that's when Clinton said, "I can't take it anymore.

"Tell me what to do.

"You got to, got to give me...

Tell me what to do," he screams at me.

We finally persuaded Hillary,

much against her better instincts,

to call the president

and say that we wanted him to authorize Attorney General Reno

to appoint a special counsel.

Exhausted and heartsick over the recent death of his mother,

Clinton did not put up a fight.

On January 20, 1994, Attorney General Janet Reno,

acting on Clinton's authorization,

appointed lawyer Robert Fiske as special counsel

in the Whitewater matter.

Most of the newspapers in the country asked me

to have a special counsel appointed.

That's what I have done.

I did it so that I could go on with my work.

I want a full investigation.

I want this thing to be done, fully, clearly,

and to be over with.

Years later, Clinton would say,

"It was the worst mistake of my presidency."

By the spring of 1994,

Bill Clinton had endured 18 months of attacks

by his political enemies, the press and even other Democrats.

Tired of playing defense,

he set out to reclaim his presidency

with one grand gesture.

Clinton understood

that very few presidents create their own greatness.

Greatness is usually thrust upon them by a crisis.

Abe Lincoln had the Civil War,

Franklin Roosevelt had the Depression and World War II.

And so that was a challenge for Clinton.

"What am I going to do that's going to make me remembered?"

For 60 years, this country has tried to reform health care.

President Roosevelt tried, President Truman tried,

President Nixon tried, President Carter tried.

Every time, the special interests were powerful enough

to defeat them, but not this time.

Health care was to be

the giant monument of the Clinton presidency.

Under our plan,

every American would receive a health care security card.

Bill Clinton held up this health care card

that we were all going to get.

Every one of us were going to get this card

from the government, you know,

certifying that we had health care coverage,

and we were all certain

that we were absolutely going to get this done.

To lead the signature initiative of his presidency,

Clinton turned, as he always did,

to the person he trusted most.

This is a crucial moment

in the fight for health care reform in our nation.

We all know our country needs health security

that's decent, affordable for every American.

There are those who would cynically say

he owed her for standing by her man,

despite Gennifer Flowers and all the rest during the campaign.

But I think it was something else.

Clinton adores her.

And he especially adores her mind.

We cannot provide

primary and preventive health care in America

if we don't make better use of our nurses.

Bill Clinton really believed

that if anybody was going to come up with the answer

to the most vexing public policy problem out there,

it was going to be Hillary.

It was one of the stupidest political decisions

that Bill Clinton ever made.

And now it's time for everybody to board their buses.

Hillary Clinton took to her new job

with all the energy and determination pent up

during the previous year.

This is an issue that affects everybody.

In forums and town meetings across the country,

she heard stories of insurance abuse,

exorbitant health care bills, and poor quality care.

But once back in Washington,

she shut out nearly every outside voice,

relying on a tight circle of advisors

to write a 1,300-page plan

that would radically reshape the nation's health care system.

There was a rigidity and an unwillingness to really listen.

The mark of a good politician is to listen

and to be able to understand what's really being said.

The frailty of Hillary

was it was too cloistered, too walled off,

and she really thought what she perceived as the public opinion

in favor of health care

would override the resistance in Congress

and of the special interests, and it was a big mistake.

This was covered under our old plan.

Oh, yeah, that was a good one, wasn't it?

By the summer, Hillary's plan

was being pilloried by the health insurance industry

as a big government take-over of health care.

We spent more than a year

trying to legislate something the country didn't want.

Having choices we don't like

is no choice at all.

They choose.

We lose.

We scared people by saying,

"The health care system isn't working,

and here comes the government to fix it."

And Ronald Reagan had been schooling this public

for many years now that the government is the problem.

People didn't think, "Oh great, here comes the government."

Reagan had won that argument.

Clinton did little to hedge Hillary's "all or nothing" bet

or avert the looming political catastrophe.

In the president's mind,

this was something that he had given to Hillary

and he was very, very reluctant to override her.

And I think that because of the husband-wife relationship

that it was not something that he was willing to take on.

It inhibited Bill Clinton

from following his own independent judgment,

his own best instincts of when to compromise.

He found it difficult to defy her very powerful wishes,

and that's not a position a president wants to be in.

Socialized medicine makes me sick!

Socialized medicine makes me sick!

Throughout the summer of 1994,

as lawmakers heard from their frightened constituents,

Hillary's health care bill lost support.

By Labor Day, before it even came up for a vote in Congress,

the Clinton health care bill was dead.

The defeat of health care was a huge defeat.

It was the number-one objective,

and to have it defeated was a repudiation, in a sense,

or at least felt like a repudiation

of the Clinton administration.

By the fall of 1994,

the Clinton presidency was at its lowest ebb.

Weakened by scandal and the defeat of health care,

Clinton was about to be challenged

by a new and formidable rival.

I am a genuine revolutionary.

They are the genuine reactionaries.

We are going to change their world.

They will do anything to stop us.

Brimming with self-confidence,

Georgia congressman Newt Gingrich

had spent more than a decade

planning his assault on the Democratic Party.

He was a giant personality.

He was one of the best policy wonks

and thinkers of new ideas around,

but his style was very different from mine.

His personality and approach was...

if it's not arrogance, it's at least overconfidence.

You know, Clausewitz said that war is politics by other means.

Newt thought the reverse was true,

that politics was war by other means.

Gingrich's ultimate goal was nothing less than a dismantling

of what he called the "liberal welfare state."

He would begin by trying to break

the Democrats' 40-year stranglehold

on the House of Representatives

in the upcoming midterm elections.

We had some people that were not satisfied

to just passively go along

with being in an abused, mistreated minority.

And there were a lot of Republicans

that had been in the minority for so long they thought,

"This is where we belong and this is okay,

if they'll just give us a crumb or two."

Newt started rockin' the boat.

Gingrich decided that the best way to achieve

a Republican victory in the midterms

was to run against Clinton.

Republican candidates across the country

morphed their Democratic opponents into the president.

Look at congressman Tim Johnson's voting record.

It looks just like Bill Clinton's liberal agenda.

The plan was to nationalize the election.

Newt saw fundamental flaws

in the Democratic Party's relationship

with the American electorate.

And he wanted to develop and exploit those

and run a campaign based on that.

As the elections approached, Clinton hit the campaign trail,

hoping that his old magic could hold back the Republican tide.

Part of Bill Clinton's persona is an abiding belief

that if he can just have enough time,

he can win over just about anybody.

Clinton was sure his record

could yet win over the American people.

By the fall of 1994, the economy was growing again.

In September, he added a new ban on assault weapons

to his list of accomplishments.

But scandals, the failure of health care,

and foreign policy missteps

weighed heavily on public opinion.

I remember him saying to me on God knows how many speeches,

"Harold, if I can just communicate to enough Americans

"what we have done and where we want to take the country,

we'll win this."

I now declare the polls open.

One of the big questions of the day is

whether the Republicans have been successful

in turning this election into a referendum on Bill Clinton

as they had wanted.

Our exit polls are turning up bad news all over the country

for President Clinton and his party.

I had called a friend at NBC

to find out what the 1:30 exit polls looked like

and she told me,

"Well, Tony, I actually haven't seen the exit...

"the 1:30 exit polls, they're holding them back.

"Apparently you guys are doing so well

that there must be something wrong with the polling,"

and that was the beginning of a hopeful evening

that turned into a glorious one.

This is truly a wildly historic night.

I mean, this is just...

The Republican Revolution of election '94

shook Capitol Hill like an earthquake today.

Its reverberations went into statehouses

and moved the whole political landscape sharply to the right.

By the end of the night,

Republicans had picked up 54 seats in the House

and eight in the Senate,

winning control of both chambers of Congress.

The longest walk I took in my life was from my...

I was still in the basement in the West Wing,

over to the second floor of the residence

to tell him what he already knew,

that we had lost the House and the Senate.

That Christmas was another dismal one.

Clinton wandered the corridors of the White House

obsessing about his defeat.

The old question haunted him: "What did I do wrong?"

In politics, you want to be loved.

Politics is about wanting to be loved,

and suddenly there's a message that maybe they don't love you.

And how do you deal with that?

He really went through a lot of, you know,

of kind of internal conflicts.

But again, typical Bill Clinton, you know, he was angry,

he was mad, he was, you know, kind of, "What went wrong?"

But at the same time, he was asking himself,

"How do I fix it?"

There was no doubt in my mind

that Bill Clinton could come back or would come back.

He always came back.

Bill Clinton was constitutionally incapable

of not coming back.

The real question was how.

In what form?