Truth to Tell

Tell It Early, Tell It All, Tell It Yourself: Notes from My White House Education

Lanny J. Davis

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 1999
• Print ISBN: 9780743247825
• eBook ISBN: 9780684864136
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

On a November afternoon in 1996, Lanny Davis got a phone call that would change his life. It was from a top aide at the White House, asking him if he was interested in joining the president's senior staff. Within a few short weeks he had signed on as special counsel to the president. Fourteen months later, his tour of duty almost over, he got another phone call, this time from a Washington Post reporter who asked, "Have you ever heard the name Monica Lewinsky?"
In the time between those two phone calls, Davis received an extraordinary political education. As President Bill Clinton's chief spokesman for handling "scandal matters" he had the unenviable job of briefing reporters and answering their pointed questions on the most embarrassing allegations against the president and his aides, from charges of renting out the Lincoln Bedroom, to stories of selling plots in Arlington Cemetery, from irregular campaign fundraising to sexual improprieties. He was the White House's first line of defense against the press corps and the reporters' first point of entry to an increasingly reticent administration. His delicate task was to remain credible to both sides while surviving the inevitable crossfire.
Upon entering the White House, Davis discovered that he was never going to be able to turn bad news into good news, but he could place the bad news in its proper context and work with reporters to present a fuller picture. While some in the White House grew increasingly leery of helping a press corps that they regarded as hostile, Davis moved in the opposite direction, pitching unfavorable stories to reporters and helping them garner the facts to write those stories accurately. Most surprisingly of all, he realized that to do his job properly, he sometimes had to turn himself into a reporter within the White House, interviewing his colleagues and ferreting out information. Along the way, he learned the true lessons of why politicians, lawyers, and reporters so often act at cross-purposes and gained some remarkable and counterintuitive insights into why this need not be the case. Searching out the facts wherever he could find them, even if he had to proceed covertly, Davis discovered that he could simultaneously help the reporters do their jobs and not put the president in legal or political jeopardy.
With refreshing candor, Davis admits his own mistakes and reveals those instances where he dug a deeper hole for himself by denying the obvious and obfuscating the truth. And in a powerful reassessment of the scandal that led to the president's impeachment, Davis suggests that if the White House had been more receptive to these same hard-won lessons, the Monica Lewinsky story might not have come so close to bringing down an otherwise popular president. For as Davis learned above all, you can always make a bad story better by telling it early, telling it all, and telling it yourself.

1
Whose Side Are You On?

MIKE McCURRY WAS IN A GOOD MOOD. I WAS IN HIS OFFICE ON December 10, 1996, my second day in the White House, and he was trying to explain my job as the press’s point man on scandal. He was grinning like a Cheshire cat—as if he knew something I didn’t know, saw something I didn’t see. His feet were on his half-moon desk. Behind him were watercolor paintings by his children, giving a surreal impressionistic backdrop for a tutorial on how to handle the scandal machine.

This is going to be fun, he said, watching me suffer.

Some fun, I said.

I remembered the first time I talked to McCurry about whether I should take the job, just a month or so before. My title was supposed to be “special counsel to the president,” but my central responsibility was to deal with the press on behalf of the president and the White House on a variety of “scandal” stories, primarily the ones dealing with the allegations of Democratic campaign-finance abuses. My concern was that since McCurry spoke for the president and the White House, and since I was supposed to do the same, if I took the job how would I know where his job ended and mine began?

“That’s easy,” he said. “Have you ever seen the bumper sticker, ‘Shit Happens’?”

“Yes.”

“Well, when shit happens—you speak.”

We both laughed—the kind of nervous laughter, however, when a joke cuts just too close to the bone of truth. McCurry got suddenly serious. He told me, Your work on the scandal watch is more important than you realize, and has serious implications. Every time I am able to shovel a bad scandal-story question over to you, you’ll be helping me—and the president—to put public focus on the president’s agenda, on issues that the American people care about and elected him to work on. That means, he reminded me, that it’s your job to take the poison, to catch the flak. (Whatever the metaphor, I got the point.) Your role, he went on, will be to separate the president and his press secretary from these scandal stories so that we can concentrate on doing the business of the country. This will be critical to the president’s success in his second term. Remember that, he repeated, the stakes are enormous.

Then we talked about the strategic rules for damage control that we had both come to understand through more than two decades of experience in national politics, political campaigns, and dealings with the press corps. We did not invent these rules; they are well known to corporate crisis managers and to political consultants and press secretaries who try to minimize the damage of a negative breaking story. My predecessors at the White House—Harold Ickes, Jane Sherburne, Mark Fabiani, and Christopher Lehane—had had great success following these rules as well.

You can’t help the president, McCurry said, unless you are credible to the press. In this place, there are some people who don’t get it and will accuse you of consorting with the enemy, of forgetting whose side you’re supposed to be on, and worst of all, of pandering to the press. Forget them. To help your client the most, you have work to do to establish your credibility with the press. Right now, he said, most of the reporters think you’re a partisan pit bull for Clinton. (I winced inwardly, hearing that, realizing it was largely true.) You need to prove to them that you can defend your client while still being straight with them and helping them do their jobs.

He reminded me of the one absolute rule, with no exceptions: Never, never lie or mislead the press. If you are under pressure to, then refuse or resign. If you can’t answer a question completely and honestly, then tell the reporter exactly that. If giving them half the information is going to mislead them into writing an inaccurate story, then give them nothing.

In this context, we then talked about the difference between “good spin” and “bad spin.” The rules for dealing with bad news are not about turning bad news into good news. Facts are facts—and no amount of spinning will alter those facts. We can’t change bad facts or avoid all damage. Rather, good spinning aims to minimize the damage—by surrounding bad facts with context, with good facts (if there are any), and, if possible, with a credible, favorable (or less damaging) interpretation of these facts. Even if there is no such damage-limiting interpretation of the information available, there is still a good chance that reporters and the public will discount the impact of the story if the object of the bad news proactively puts the facts out: “If they helped put the story out, how bad could it be?”

In recent years, the word “spinning” has been given a somewhat pejorative connotation. But this fails to distinguish good from bad. Bad spinning is essentially a strategy of deception. It attempts to turn a bad story into a good story by hiding or obscuring bad facts, by releasing information selectively and misleadingly, and sometimes by being less than completely forthright in answering media questions. As I was to learn, bad spinning is not only dishonest, it is ineffective. Sooner or later, the reporters will catch up with the omitted facts or, ultimately, with the misleading information. Then the story will be written with the additional “Gotcha!” element that always makes it worse—and the reporters who were the victims of the deception will almost certainly find a way to enjoy their revenge.

It was clear that McCurry and I spoke the same language, had the same philosophy about disclosure and accuracy. We talked for a while about his unhappy experiences the preceding fall, in the last few weeks before the November elections, when the Democratic campaign-finance stories first broke. He warned me that because the White House had mounted such an effective blocking action before the election to stop the press from writing stories about controversial Asian American Democratic fundraisers like John Huang and Charlie Trie, the press was out for blood and I would be the recipient of their ire. Which brought him to the next point, the core of our strategy in handling the campaign-finance scandal: I had to get all the bad stories written before the opening day of the Senate hearings, if possible over the Christmas holidays, when the politicians would be out of town and most normal people would be more concerned about their families and Christmas shopping than about John Huang and Charlie Trie. The key premise was that all these bad and embarrassing campaign finance stories are coming out anyway. By definition, the worse they were the more certain it was that they would come out. Better that they get written now so that they will be old news by the time the Senate hearings begin. People will be bored with this stuff by the time the TV cameras are turned on.

I’m going to be helping reporters write bad stories? I asked. Stories that will embarrass us, even damage us politically?

That’s the inherent paradox in your job, McCurry said.

And you’ll back me up when I am criticized for being on the wrong side—for consorting with the enemy? I asked. I knew that charge would be made early and often.

Yes, I will.

This is a job where I am certain to make mistakes, I said. I’m going to hold you to that.

We then discussed the importance of the baseline or “predicate” story: Help the reporter writing the first story, make sure it’s complete, with everything in it—and in all likelihood the story will be over. From that point on, other reporters will find it when they search the LEXIS-NEXIS database of published newspaper stories, and so it will become the starting point for all future reporting. If you let the story dribble out in pieces, we agreed, there’ll be ten bad stories, each half right and incomplete, rather than one bad story.

There are different ways of getting these predicate stories written, he pointed out. Sometimes there will be reasons why the White House will not want to officially put a story out on the record. I’d have to figure out a way to put them out anyway without asking permission.

Such as?

Learn how to place stories with individual reporters on background, he said—be fair, rotate so that each news organization gets a fair shot—and make sure they have enough information to write the stories fairly and completely.

He said he wanted to be kept informed at all times, but he would trust me to use my judgment, given my legal training, as to how much he should know or needed to know. If the leaks get you in trouble with some of your colleagues, he said, remember: As long as you are following the strategy of getting these campaign-finance stories that are coming out anyway written before the hearings, then taking the flak inside this place is as much your job as taking it from outside. He added, pointedly, Some people will seem unhappy with your leaks while knowing you are doing the right thing and giving them deniability.

Which brought him to his final point: The toughest part of your job is that you have three constituencies to be worried about, who at various times will be at cross-purposes: Your client, the president of the United States; the press; and your fellow lawyers in the counsel’s office. When you are in the room with your fellow lawyers in the counsel’s office, you have to be vocal in representing the White House’s political and press interests. You will be the only person in this place who wears all three hats, he said. You will have to run the risk of angering some of your fellow attorneys by playing that role, but that’s your job.

I was growing more and more anxious. It seemed as if he was prescribing a role for me destined to fail: one with a high risk of alienating my legal colleagues in the counsel’s office; one of possibly angering the president by helping the press write bad stories about him; and, inevitably, one of being cut up in the press through anonymous leaks as being ineffective in obtaining information and lacking support from within the White House. And that would be the end of me. I said as much to McCurry.

He grinned, mischievously. Everyone who is a friend of Mike McCurry knows that grin—somewhere between childlike and evil.

He said I’d be fine, waving me out of the office, his feet back up on the half-moon desk. I tried to smile back. As I walked through the door, I was asking myself how the hell I had ever said yes to this job.

Hey, Lanny, one more thing, he called out. I turned around.

I’ll back you up, he said. But don’t fuck up.

There was that grin again.

IQUICKLY LEARNED, THE HARD WAY, that it’s not enough simply to take the rules for damage control and start applying them. There was another set of rules that had to be learned too—the press’s rules. A press secretary has to know these rules, just as a lawyer has to know the law. I had to learn the vocabulary for conversations with the press corps, their ethical values, the work habits and rhythms and pressures of their professional life. I had to learn how to argue without offending, how to concede the point and yield damaging information without being disloyal to the president. I had to learn how to be fair and avoid giving unfair advantages among hard-driving, ambitious competitors, while also grasping the subtleties of helping reporters who have given you a fair shake and not going out of your way to help those who haven’t.

Vocabulary training was my first lesson. Unfortunately, when I arrived at the White House, no one, including McCurry, thought to teach me the difference between “off the record,” “background,” and “deep background.” I guess they assumed I knew the difference. I guess I assumed I knew the difference. We were all wrong.

Less than two weeks into my job in the White House, on Sunday afternoon, December 22, 1996, I received a call from Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post. As I had already discovered, if there was a reporter anywhere working on a scandal story relating to the Clinton White House, the system McCurry had already put into place was that they would now be calling me, not him; and it would be my responsibility to listen to their questions, prod them into telling me as much information as possible to enable me to get them the accurate answers, and then get back to them. In this capacity, in the ordinary course of a day, I would receive twenty-five to fifty phone calls. In the middle of a breaking hot story, the calls would balloon to almost twice that number—all of them from reporters asking questions, needing information, public comment, or background comment, and needing it within hours or sometimes within minutes to meet their deadlines.

Ruth Marcus of the Post was interested in what had been discussed at a spring 1996 meeting between Michael Cardozo, director of the Presidential Legal Defense Fund (established to help the Clintons pay their legal bills), and senior White House staff. Specifically, she wanted to know whether the White House officials attending that meeting had advised Cardozo on what to do about returning hundreds of thousands of dollars in suspicious checks raised by Charlie Trie, a Little Rock restaurateur who knew Bill Clinton from his days as governor of Arkansas. Some of the checks, delivered by Trie in a brown paper bag, seemed to be legal, but many were written in the same handwriting, with the same misspellings, although each was signed with a different person’s name. The issue of whether White House officials had advised Cardozo had important legal and political implications, because the Legal Defense Fund was established to be completely independent of and insulated from the White House, with a bipartisan board of trustees.

It had been reported in various newspapers that such a meeting had been held, and reporters were suspicious that senior White House officials had indeed been very much involved in the decision to return the checks, and then, remarkably, had kept the Trie checks secret from the press until after the November elections. Marcus was specifically interested in whether any White House official had argued to Cardozo that the nonsuspicious checks raised by Trie did not need to be returned, especially given the fact that the Clintons owed millions in legal fees. I had the impression from Marcus’s questions and tone that she had a source telling her that such an argument had been made by someone at the meeting with Cardozo.

I hung up the phone and called one of the White House attorneys who was assigned to supervise my fact-finding in response to press inquiries. During my first days at the White House, I was informed by my supervisors in the counsel’s office that I was not permitted to do any independent fact-finding to answer reporters’ questions. I had to ask one of the White House attorneys to do the fact-finding for me. In this instance, I was told I could not call anyone directly who attended that meeting to ask Marcus’s questions myself. The explanation for this two-stage process was that there might be information that I could not reveal to the press, and thus I might be compromised if I found such information out.

This rationale made no sense to me. If, for example, I received information that was subject to a legal privilege, I could always tell the reporter that I could not answer the question. In any event, this was one of the early arguments I lost or, more accurately, chose not to press at the moment. I was too uncertain of my position, my leverage, or my ability to obtain reliable facts within the multilayered bureaucracies that constituted the White House complex. But I made a mental note that at some point I would probably have to break out of this prohibition and do fact-finding myself. I perceived that the real reason for limiting my fact-finding powers was to keep information closely held and to avoid leaks. It was also obvious that there must have been some perception that I might leak some information that was nonprivileged but embarrassing. In fact, that was precisely what McCurry and I had agreed I was supposed to do—get the bad stories out.

The fact-finding attorney called me back in a few minutes and said that the subject of not returning all the checks had been debated at the meeting, but that no White House official had taken a particular position one way or another. That sounded okay to me, so I called Marcus back. I told her that I didn’t have a certain answer yet, since we were still trying to contact other people who had been at the meeting, but that for now, “on background,” I could tell her that the subject of not returning some of the checks had been debated.

Several hours later the White House attorney called me and said that after making several more calls to participants in the meeting, I needed to refine somewhat the answer that I had given to the Post reporter. The subject of not returning the checks had not been debated, but rather, a “question had been raised” as to whether the checks needed to be returned. I was puzzled; I did not perceive a significant difference between having a debate and raising a question. Aren’t we asking for trouble by hairsplitting words like that? I asked. No, was the answer, a debate implies that White House people were taking a position on this matter, and that’s not accurate. I called Ruth Marcus back and gave her the refinement.

“But that’s different from what you told me earlier,” she said, agreeing with the White House attorney that there was in fact a significant difference between my two statements.

“It’s really not that different,” I responded. “Debating something, versus raising a question whether something should be done—that’s not really that different. Anyway, I was talking on background, and I told you we were trying to confirm this by talking to other people at the meeting.”

After some back-and-forth discussion, in which I attempted to persuade Marcus that there really wasn’t too much difference between the two formulations, she reluctantly agreed to use the second one.

A short time later, the White House attorney called me again. After talking to still more people who attended the meeting, the consensus was that the question that was raised at the meeting by a White House official was not whether the good checks needed to be returned, but rather how it would look to the public if the good checks were returned. The concern seemed to be that there might appear to be an ethnic slight if perfectly legal checks, all drawn by people with Asian surnames, were returned to the donors.

I thought this was a valid point to be concerned about, and I said so, but I also commented that this formulation was quite different from the previous two. Well, came the response, that is the most accurate answer, and you need to call Ruth Marcus back. I respected this attorney’s devotion to accuracy and factual precision. But I worried that at this point I would be pushing Ruth Marcus one step too far. The attorney was adamant. I called Marcus back and told her the new formulation. “This is clearly the one most people remember, Ruth,” I said.

Her reaction was not very positive, to say the least. She suggested that I had changed my story to avoid admitting that the White House had gotten involved in a substantive discussion with the Defense Fund trustees, and that she found it very interesting that I had given her three different versions within a few hours. That in and of itself, she said, was newsworthy.

“Wait a minute,” I said, my stomach beginning to roll as I sensed that I was starting to get into very troubled waters. “We were on background. I told you I was trying to confirm this information each time we talked.”

“I won’t quote you by name, just as a White House official,” she said. “That’s what ‘on background’ means.”

“I thought it meant off the record until I can confirm it,” I answered, trying to hide my panic.

“Sorry, it doesn’t.”

“But you’ve got to use my last comment to you, because I am told that is the most accurate consensus of people’s memories,” I said, hearing a note of pleading in my voice.

There was a pause. I half held my breath, waiting.

“Okay,” Marcus said. “I’ll put into the story your last formulation—someone asking about how it would look to return all the good checks if they are all from Asian American names.”

“Thank you, Ruth,” I said, relieved.

“But I will also quote the first two statements you gave me on background,” she said.

My stomach began to roll again. “What? You can’t do that. That wouldn’t be fair—I told you, I thought ‘on background’ meant ‘off the record,’ ” I said.

Marcus was unrelenting: She believed that I had been tugged around by White House participants, who were concerned about a news report that some had, in fact, urged Cardozo not to send the good checks back and, now that the story had come out, were trying to blur what happened. Again I was struck with the impression that she had other sources on this, and that she knew mor...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Author’s Note
• Prologue The Monica Lewinsky Story: The First Ten Days
• 1 Whose Side Are You On?
• 2 Making Waves
• 3 Two Plus Two Equals Five
• 4 Shocked, Shocked
• 5 Unconnecting The Dots
• 6 Invisible Skeletons
• 7 Been There, Done That
• 8 Nunsense
• 9 Dead Men Do Tell Tales
• Epilogue The Monica Lewinsky Story: In Retrospect
• Acknowledgments
• Index