Wild Card

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By Newsweek Editors

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THERE WERE TIMES, HIS AIDES THOUGHT, WHEN Bill Clinton acted more like a campaign consultant than a president. No detail was too trivial for the chief executive. He would edit his own fund-raising mail. He wanted to know who was traveling on each campaign trip. He could spend hours analyzing polling data, screening commercials, debating the pros and cons of negative advertising.

And there were times when Dick Morris acted more like a president than a campaign consultant. Here was a man who could announce to a receptionist at a dentist's office that he was ""running the country.'' Morris bragged that he operated under ""Hillary rules'': if Clinton could tell his wife, he could tell Morris.

He expressed everything with an air of certainty that others found insufferable. ""I'm not arguing what I think,'' he would say when challenged, ""I'm arguing what I know.'' He quoted Bob Dylan and mused about the ""Hegelian synthesis.'' At meetings, he would ask with archaic politeness, ""May I be seated?'' But he didn't hesitate to talk back to the president. After one meeting in the Yellow Oval Room, he had blown up at Clinton for appointing Evelyn Lieberman as deputy chief of staff to replace Erskine Bowles, who was leaving to run his family's company. ""I thought we had a mutual-consultation agreement,'' Morris scolded the president in front of the others who had stayed behind. ""You've gotten everything so far,'' Clinton snapped back. ""Your pollsters, your media team.'' Referring to Bob Squier's close ties to Gore, Clinton continued to bristle: ""Hell, you've practically turned the vice president into your employee. Everyone's on a team around here, but no one's on the president's team,'' Clinton sulked. Stung by Clinton's criticism, Morris bolted from Washington the next morning. The day after that he secretly signed a $2.5 million book contract with Random House to tell his version of the campaign.

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Morris was obsessed with control. Though only a political consultant, he thought nothing of calling subcabinet officers and, in the name of the president, demanding action on his pet policies. He threw tantrums if he suspected one of his staff of talking to a reporter, but met secretly with a stream of journalists in his suite at the Jefferson Hotel. Once when two reporters stopped to chat, one on the way out of his room, the other on the way in, he joked, ""Gentleman callers in a brothel don't talk to each other.''

White House staffers laughed at Morris's behavior between their spasms of outrage. But they also paid attention. They could see results in every tracking poll. Morris and pollster Mark Penn had found a way of talking to the swing voters--the young marrieds with children who were worried about the declining morality and civility of American society. These people didn't trust government to come up with grand schemes, and they thought Congress was a hopeless sinkhole. But they were grateful for small, concrete steps that might improve the quality of their lives. Accordingly, throughout the spring and the summer of 1996, Clinton made a series of modest proposals to tidy up the neighborhood of American life: he supported school uniforms, curfews for teenagers, V-chips to screen out smut on TV, tobacco-ad bans and tuition tax credits. Even if the media ridiculed the proposals as petty and the president as ""mayor in chief,'' the strategy was working. Young suburban parents--''soccer moms,'' in the new political vernacular--were responding. By summer, Clinton's personal- and job-approval ratings were in the low 60s--record territory for this president. At campaign headquarters and in the White House, people began whispering the word ""landslide.''

Morris's great gift, said White House aide Bruce Reed, was ""to imagine things that others thought unthinkable.'' When some of Morris's dreams came true, he dreamt up even wilder ones. His overreaching became increasingly laughable. In February, when he learned that anti-tobacco activist Victor Crawford was dying, he urged Clinton to rush to the deathbed for a photo op. ""When should we do this?'' asked Leon Panetta, with mock seriousness. ""Quickly,'' Morris answered, oblivious to the sarcasm. ""He's dying.'' Another time, Morris proposed a rating system for violent toys. White House staffers gave up after they couldn't figure out how to classify squirt guns.

In early August, George Stephanopoulos called Morris to tell him about a major scientific discovery. Analysis of a meteorite that had fallen to Earth from Mars showed fossilized evidence that life had once existed there. ""This is going to break and we need to respond to it,'' said Stephanopoulos.

""This is huge. Huge,'' Morris replied. Life on Mars was futuristic, millennial, spiritual--just the story for the man to lead the nation into the 21st century. It was so obvious: Clinton = future, Dole = past. Mars could be Clinton's New Frontier. ""I've got it,'' he blurted to Stephanopoulos after a couple of seconds. ""We announce a manned mission to Mars.''

Stephanopoulos sighed and hung up, but Morris started working his cell phone. He placed calls to technological experts in Gore's office (the vice president was a fan of the space program). He called NASA, he called the rest of his team, he called anyone who would listen. ""We need to get on this,'' he bellowed. He invoked the summer hit movie "'Independence Day,'' about a president who fights off space invaders. Life on Mars was the ultimate triangulation, he argued. Clinton as leader of the Earthlings, boldly going where no Democrat had ever gone before.

The only thing that was launched was another round of Dick Morris jokes. ""Dick, we've got good news and bad news,'' went one. ""The good news is that we've agreed to go ahead with the manned mission you proposed. The bad news is: you're the man. How soon can you be ready?'' Stephanopoulos cracked, ""There's life on Mars. Dick's proof.''

His obsession with control made him want to dictate every detail of the Democratic convention. Without consulting anyone, Morris privately banged out speeches for Hillary and Gore. His language, always florid, was becoming rococo. For a section on children's issues in the First Lady's speech, Morris wrote, ""Bloom, little ones, wherever you are planted.'' Harry Thomasson, the Clintons' friend and Hollywood producer who'd been brought in to stage the Chicago convention, drawled, ""Dick's gone bad. Someone's gonna have to put him down.''

A few days before the convention, Morris showed up in Gore's office with an unsolicited draft of the vice president's speech. Instead of dropping off the speech for Gore to study at his convenience, Morris planted himself behind an old wingback chair and began to orate. When he got to the applause lines, he excitedly thumped on the side of the chair. Eager to spare the White House antiques, Gore and others applauded dramatically whenever Morris started slapping the chair. After Morris left, Gore turned to his slack-jawed advisers. ""Well,'' the vice president said, ""that was entertaining.'' He threw away Morris's speech.

Morris was furious when he didn't get his way. He cussed out Ron Klain, Gore's chief of staff, over the speech that paralyzed actor Christopher Reeve was to deliver on the first night of the convention. He fought so angrily with adman Bob Squier over the keynote address to be given by Indiana Gov. Evan Bayh that the two men stopped speaking to each other. He sparred with Harold Ickes, who refused to listen to his harangues and threw him out of his office. Inevitably, the spats spilled into the press. TOP STRATEGIST LOSING HIS GRIP ON CAMPAIGN, headlined The Wall Street Journal as the Democrats headed for Chicago. No one knew it at the time, but Morris had bigger problems brewing with a less reputable paper.

Morris's home in Washington was ""the King Suite'' in the Jefferson Hotel, six blocks from the White House. The suite was tastefully appointed with faux antiques and oil paintings of 19th-century European pastoral scenes. It was one of only two suites in the hotel with a balcony.

Beginning in August 1995, Morris had been visited on a regular basis by a $200-a-night call girl named Sherry Rowlands. In July 1996, Rowlands called on the editors of the Star, a supermarket tabloid based in Tarrytown, N.Y. She described, in detail, Morris's fondness for fondling and licking her feet, how he liked to read foot-fetish magazines and how on one occasion he crawled around the hotel room ""on all fours, like a dog.'' Never reluctant to show off, he let Rowlands listen in on his phone conversations with the president. During one discussion, according to Rowlands, Clinton became irate at Morris's suggestion that he cut Medicare to make a budget deal. She quoted the president as saying, ""Aw hell, Dick, I don't want to wake up in the morning and see a whole bunch of cripples in wheelchairs chained to my front gate.''

MORRIS LAVISHED champagne and gifts on Rowlands, but, as she explained to the Star's editors, she became put off by his tastes and his indiscretions. Morris would describe his petty feuds with Stephanopoulos and Ickes. ""She came to be quite offended by the way he was acting--and how childish they [the White House staff] all were,'' said Mark Goodling, the Star writer assigned to the story. ""She told me, "I think grown-ups ought to be running the country'.'' Her motives in going to the Star were not entirely patriotic. Unlike mainstream news organizations, the Star pays for news.

The Star, with 2.5 million readers, calls itself a ""responsible tabloid.'' The paper's editors wanted some proof. Rowlands turned over diaries she had kept, her private key to the King Suite and a check signed over to her by Morris. On the evening of Aug. 22, four days before the Chicago convention opened, Rowlands lured Morris onto the balcony of the suite. There, in the warm twilight, they hugged and kissed in their bathrobes. Sev- eral floors above, a Star photographer snapped pictures.

The Chicago convention promised to be a moment of liberation for Hillary Clinton. It has been a bumpy year for her--in many ways a bumpy four years. In the world beyond the Beltway, she was something of an icon, even a saint, for many women; thousands flocked to see her in her travels in America and abroad, teetering on folding chairs in crowded halls just to catch a glimpse. But back home in Washington, she felt trapped inside her caricature as a pushy Yuppie overachiever who would bend the rules and sacrifice her friends to have her way. Her split image ""be-flummoxed'' her, an aide said, though she herself seemed at times to make it worse with her lawyerly caginess under fire.

When the miasma of accusations became thickest--a memo turned up implicating her in Travelgate, her law firm's long-lost billing records were discovered in the White House family quarters--Mrs. Clinton tended to keep her anger inside. At times she became depressed and listless, at other times she was the Sister Frigidaire of her high-school nickname. She took refuge with her own staff, with whom she would giggle and gossip. A few days after Bob Woodward's book appeared, relating the First Lady's imagined conversations with Eleanor Roosevelt, George Stephanopoulos, a bachelor, asked if she could set him up with Helen of Troy. ""No problem,'' she said, laughing. Her staff joked about opening up a clothing boutique called the Hearing Line. It would sell testimony-appropriate dresses to female witnesses at court or congressional hearings. For the grand jury, primness was essential. For the Hill, dress for TV but never wear red: it clashed with the red cover on Sen. Alfonse D'Amato's witness table.

Hillary also found relief in her role as mother. Her real worry, her aides said in late summer, was not Whitewater but the prospect of Chelsea, now 16, going away to college. The Clintons began to talk more earnestly about adopting a child. Living over the store meant that the Clintons were able to see Chelsea a good deal, despite their hectic schedules. Mrs. Clinton would leave important meetings to take her daughter's calls or slip away to help with homework. When she emerged from the residence looking haggard one morning, she explained, ""I was up late working on the Mesopotamians.'' At supper, the First Family would hold hands and pray. Their intimacy may have been heightened by a sense that just outside the gates and down in the press room lurked the enemy.

The Clintons were fiercely protective. Any aide who suggested using Chelsea as a campaign prop got the Sister Frigidaire stare. At Sidwell Friends, Chelsea's private school, her classmates were given First Kid sensitivity training (""Pretend you're Chelsea. Would you like to try out for the school play?''). Classroom doors were locked, and students had to knock and give their names. Chelsea was never made available for photos or interviews. Remarkably, the press behaved. Before she died, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis had given Mrs. Clinton some tips on raising children in the White House. The key, she said, was to keep the press away and try to create normalcy. A ""normal'' childhood was hard in a house with 132 rooms and more than a hundred employees, but the Clintons tried. After a private screening for her friends in the White House theater, Chelsea had to sweep up the popcorn. In the summer of '94, Chelsea wanted to go camping in the Tetons. So the Clintons did--and while they slept, 25 Secret Service agents with night-vision goggles roamed the woods.

CHELSEA HAD LOOKED LIKE A frightened, awkward preteen at the 1992 convention, especially next to the svelte, blond Gore children. But when she re-emerged in public in 1996, she was clearly a poised and lovely young woman, affectionate with her family and easy with strangers. Some advisers wanted to feature her prominently at the convention. The president was furious over rumors that Chelsea would make a speech. But she wanted to ride on the 21st Century Express, the train carrying the president to Chicago, and go to the parties, including a bash given by JFK Jr. She got her way.

As plans for the convention took shape, some Clinton staffers worried that a major speech by Hillary would revive charges that she was an unelected co-president. Morris suggested that Hillary tape video greetings from various venues around Chicago--the lake, a ballpark, a candy store. Too cute, said Hillary. She wanted to make a speech about families in response to Dole's attack on her book, ""It Takes a Village,'' in San Diego.

She was nervous; she had never spoken to a prime-time audience, and she was unaccustomed to TelePrompTers. But the audience didn't mind. They roared when Hillary fired back at Dole, ""Yes, it takes a village. And it takes a president.'' The speech was a hit with the voters the campaign cared about: working women age 25 to 50. ""She locked 'em up,'' said an adviser. Her ""favorables'' with that group soared into the 70s. And her overall favorable rating crept back into the 50s. Her message was exactly what the convention image makers had hoped for: Democrats are pro-family. Through no fault of the Clintons, that theme was about to get a rude jolt.

Mike McCurry, the president's spokesman, got the call aboard the 21st Century Express on Wednesday afternoon as the train approached Michigan City, Ind. It was Dick Morris with some awkward news. The next day--the day of President Clinton's acceptance speech--a tabloid was going to run a story alleging that Morris had solicited sex with a prostitute. ""How should we handle this?'' Morris asked nervously.

We? thought McCurry. He said, ""You know how these tabloids work, Dick.'' They don't always have the evidence to back the allegation. Morris started to fill him in on the lurid details. ""Stop, Dick,'' said McCurry. He didn't want to hear. The less he knew, the less he would have to confirm or deny. McCurry had once joked that his job entailed the art of ""telling the truth slowly.'' But Morris was getting frantic. What would Clinton say?

The president was told later that evening as his limousine headed for the helicopter to take him to Chicago. He was weary after four days of nonstop campaigning. He knew, from painful experience, the damage a tabloid story could do. He instructed his aides to be careful, not to jump to conclusions. But if the story was true, said the president, ""it's not tolerable.''

Meanwhile, Morris was telling the other campaign consultants about the story. He was now in full denial. ""This thing will blow over,'' he said. ""The president and I have never been closer.'' Morris was about to host a dinner for his closest aides in suite 3331 of the Sheraton Towers. It was supposed to be a victory celebration, a coming-out party of sorts. Morris's face was on the cover of Time, he was the subject of a front-page USA Today profile. He was finally getting the credit he deserved.

Dick and his wife, Eileen McGann, were composed as the guests arrived. There were toasts and laughter, a glorious sunset over the lakeside skyline. Waiters proffered platters of shrimp and flutes of champagne. Morris played the benevolent pasha, presenting a young assistant with a chocolate-mousse birthday cake. At 8:30, he showed his guests the door. The vice president was speaking in an hour and a half. ""Folks, there's a show tonight,'' Morris exclaimed. ""Go to the convention. Have a great time.''

Shortly after 10, there was a knock on Morris's door. It was Erskine Bowles, a courtly, patrician Southerner who was a top adviser to Clinton and a close friend (their wives had been classmates at Wellesley). Bowles suggested that, in view of the Star revelations, Morris take a leave of absence from the campaign. Morris wasn't listening. ""Why am I not hearing from the president on this matter?'' he kept demanding. At 1:30 a.m., Bowles called in Jack Quinn, the White House counsel. Quinn, a tough Irishman, coolly asked Morris if he had a right to cast a shadow over the campaign. Morris insisted that he was not the issue. The question was whether the campaign would stand up to yellow journalism. Morris seemed convinced he could talk his way out of the jam.

The pair persisted. You will become the issue. It's not fair to the president. Do the right thing, Dick. Morris finally relented, but he spent the next few hours haggling with White House aides over ways to save face as he made his forced exit. He wanted no announcement of his resignation until he was airborne (Eileen was terrified of being ambushed by reporters). He and he alone would write the resignation statement. No one from the White House or the campaign would comment on the substance of the Star's allegations, not now, not ever. The campaign still owed him $100,000 from August ad commissions. He would have to be paid.

Quinn listened patiently, but he was disgusted with the way Morris was playing the victim. Morris's resignation statement compared himself to a Christian being tossed to the lions. Quinn told Morris his draft went too far, especially the part about being ""deeply honored to help this president come back from being buried in a landslide.'' It was insulting to the president, said Quinn. It's my resignation, Morris yelled back. He couldn't understand why he was being bullied by mere underlings. ""Why am I not hearing from the president?'' he demanded.

Morris did not sleep. At 7:30 a.m., his fellow consultants began arriving, paged for an ""emergency meeting.'' Morris was red-eyed and uncharacteristically disheveled. Eileen was distraught. Morris showed his resignation statement to Hank Sheinkopf, a friend and fellow consultant. ""Hey, Dick,'' said Sheinkopf, trying to lighten the moment. ""You're a Jew. Can the lion s--t.'' Morris punched at his laptop. He substituted, ""I will not subject my wife, family, or friends to the sadistic vitriol of yellow journalism.'' Eileen, standing amid the suitcases, talked to the early arrivals. A professional litigator, she seemed more furious than sad. ""Clinton gets away with this s--t all the time,'' she said. ""Why should Dick have to go?'' Morris was still despondent over Clinton's silence. ""I would have hoped my friend would have at least called me,'' he said.

By 8:15, Morris's team was assembled, perched uncomfortably around Morris as he slumped in a plush chair in the corner of his suite. ""I wanted to say goodbye to all of you,'' Morris said, his voice cracking. ""To thank you.'' His voice broke. ""I'm having difficulty speaking,'' he croaked. He reached for his laptop and typed furiously. He turned the screen for the group to see. TO MY FRIENDS WITH WHOM I HAVE SERVED, it began. ""I have loved being part of our joint, thrilling effort.'' He listed his colleagues one by one (""Mark Penn, thank you for your mind . . . Bob Squier, thank you for your wisdom and experience. I should have talked to you more . . .''). He asked that his staff be allowed to continue working with the consultants, ""not with the wolves at the White House,'' and promised to ""treat each of you generously and fairly in anything I might say or write. I truly love what we have been together.''

Embarrassed and shocked, the consultants filed out. Morris and Eileen made for the elevator, shielded by aides. The first person they saw in the hallway was Chelsea Clinton. Morris shrank back. In the lobby, after his aides hustled Morris into his car, they ran into James Carville, the ubiquitous former campaign strategist from 1992. ""Hey y'all,'' Carville smiled. ""What's goin' on?''

IN THE PRESS ROOM OF THE SHERATON, reporters were already pawing over copies of the New York Post, which had reprinted excerpts of the Star's ""Love Diaries.'' The reporters had been in a surly mood. The Democrats, like the Republicans in San Diego, had larded the convention schedule with treacly confessionals and true-grit testimonials--Christopher Reeve for the Democrats, victims of rape and AIDS for the Republicans. This was the year that both parties made the final leap into Oprahland, where the convention was drained of conflict and content and transformed instead into talk TV. The 15,000 reporters in town felt like extras milling around a sound stage. The Morris debacle came as journalistic deliverance.

Upstairs on the 31st floor, Clinton was exasperated. ""Do I need this today?'' he irritably asked his advisers. Here he was, worn out and hoarse from four days of stumping, about to give the most important speech of the campaign. He had been hawking family values like a preacher and now all the talk-show hosts were yakking about foot fetishes. He read Morris's farewell screed. It sounded like something O. J. Simpson might write.

Hillary was fearful that Morris might try to kill himself. She instructed her husband's staff that no one was to gloat over his demise. Dick, she said, needed help, not condemnation or ridicule. No one mentioned the name they were all thinking. ""Can you imagine if anything had happened?'' said a White House aide a few weeks later. ""It would have been Vince Foster all over again. You can just hear it. "Why didn't anyone see it coming? What secrets did Morris take to his grave? Who took his files?' ''

That afternoon, Hillary and the president, as well as Gore, called Morris to express their concern and support for him during his terrible ""ordeal.'' Other friends and colleagues called the next day. One was a little taken aback to hear him giving instructions to a photographer in the background. It seemed that Dick and Eileen were posing for the cover of Time magazine. ""It's a bit hectic now, I'll call you back later,'' said Morris. Over the weekend, he agreed to be interviewed by each of the three networks--if they agreed to hire him as a political commentator for the elections (none did). Word of his $2.5 million book deal was spreading. Two weeks later he showed up in a chauffeured limousine at The New Yorker magazine for a breakfast performance before the magazine's advertisers with Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates. The topic: politics and ethics.

White House staffers rejoiced at Morris's departure. At the next meeting of the political group in the Yellow Oval Room, Panetta gave a brief, polite appreciation of Morris's contribution to the campaign. Then he sat down in Morris's chair. Mark Penn stood up to present the latest polls. The convention bump had pushed Clinton's lead back into double digits. The Morris scandal didn't appear to be hurting the president. If anything, the contrast with his adviser made Clinton seem presidential. Vice President Gore joked that he hoped the other consultants would be available to get into trouble if the president ever fell behind.

Penn was particularly excited about another of his findings. Americans were unabashedly optimistic about the future. For the first time in Clinton's presidency, more people said the country was on the right track than the wrong track. When Penn first started polling for Clinton in the spring of 1995, ""wrong track'' led ""right track'' by 56 percent to 32 percent. By the second week of August 1996, 43 percent of voters said the country was on the right track, versus 42 percent who said it was on the wrong track. The last president to have a right-track majority, Penn knew, was Ronald Reagan.

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