Videos of President Capture a Focused Political Animal

Whether he’s standing square as a statue in the golden light of the White House East Room or balancing affably on a stool in a suburban living room, what comes through most consistently on the videotapes is a quality President Clinton described in a 1995 meeting with union leaders:

“Absolute bare-fanged determination” to keep going and prevail.

That, and an iron butt. The successful American president, it seems, must have the patience of a giant clam.

When the White House was forced last week to release dozens of videotapes of Clinton at closed-door political fund-raisers and meetings with supporters--tapes originally made for his archives, not the public--it did more than lift the veil on the way national politicians wheedle millions of dollars for their campaigns. It also provided unique images of a president operating beyond the intrusive eye of the news media, of a president free to drop his guard a fraction, unconstrained by fear that his every word might instantly echo across the land.

For the sometimes-Rhodes scholar, sometimes-Arkansas country-boy and all-the-time politician who became the 42nd president of the United States, what those less-buttoned-up images reveal is a man who never loses sight of where he wants to go, a man willing to endure almost anything so long as he can keep moving toward those ends.

Flattering fat cats with back-stage gossip about world affairs, modestly describing how he tutored Arab leaders on Middle Eastern diplomacy, mournfully confessing the sins of his opponents, striving to dip into the heart of every last soul he meets, Clinton emerges as a consummate persuader, a missionary for his own creed who combines Jimmy Carter’s encyclopedic mastery of issues with Ronald Reagan’s instinct for translating them into homey words.

Caught in the sometimes-unsteady gaze of a video camera, he compares the challenge he faces to Harry S. Truman confronting post-war Communism, or summons up T.S. Eliot to explain how voters could spurn his best efforts and crumple his party in the 1994 congressional elections.

Or, without ever losing his seemingly mild, confiding manner, he throws a remarkably sharp elbow into the eye of then-GOP challenger Bob Dole. Dole is “sort of likable,” Clinton tells Michigan backers in a seemingly generous appraisal--”depending on the day you catch him on.”

But above everything else, on almost every frame and foot of film, can be seen what may be the most important qualities behind Bill Clinton’s survival: his sheer dogged determination not to quit, and his ability to endure aggravations large and small.

Consider what he cheerfully sat through during the March 4, 1996, reception in suburban Detroit at which he let out that 50 hours of closed-door budget negotiations had convinced him that Dole’s reputation for mean-spiritedness was not wholly undeserved.

An exuberant crowd of financial backers in funny hats packed the gallery-sized living room of host David Hermalin, who took full advantage of his own moment in the spotlight. En route to introducing the president, Hermalin praised those present for supporting hospitals, schools and the symphony, as well as Democrats. He described the hopes and dreams of their immigrant forebears. He boasted of his visits to the White House and Clinton’s earlier visit to his home, presenting his guest with a T-shirt emblazoned with the dates of the various visits--just like the shirts rock groups sell on world tours.

Then, before a piano and flute combo played “Ruffles and Flourishes,” Hermalin led the audience in singing multi-verse parody songs based on “Yankee Doodle,” “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and “Happy Days Are Here Again.”

Throughout this seemingly endless prelude, Clinton beamed down from his stool, encouraged the singers to continue, laughed at the jokes, joined in the refrains. He didn’t even flinch when the irrepressible Hermalin, having at last surrendered the microphone, suddenly snatched it back from the president’s hands to say a few more words.

It would be hard to imagine Truman putting up with such a tousling of the presidential dignity.

For his part, Clinton knew exactly where to go with the predominantly Jewish audience.

He observed not once but twice that Dole--in addition to his meanness--had a 100% approval rating from the Christian Coalition. Moreover, he confided to the heirs to one of the world’s great intellectual traditions, the budget negotiations had made it painfully clear that Dole “is not interested in ideas.”

Finally, he suggested that the audience embodied his own reformulation of traditional Democratic concern for the less fortunate: “Thank you,” he said, “for living out the American dream and not wanting to pull the ladder up behind you but leaving it so someone else can climb up.”

Two months earlier, at an intimate dinner with businessmen at Washington’s Hay-Adams Hotel on Feb. 21, 1996, Clinton’s approach had more the air of serious men of affairs confiding in one another. Seated before a huge painting in an elaborately carved gold frame, he quietly treated his guests to the kinds of stories usually reserved for memoirs.

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin, before his assassination, had given Clinton this assessment of Syrian president Hafez Assad, Clinton confided: “He said he was ‘the meanest, toughest guy I ever dealt with, but if you can ever get him to give his word, he’ll keep it. And what’s more, he can keep it.’

“But trying to get him to do anything,” Clinton said of Assad, “is like haggling over the price of a rug.”

Rabin’s assassination had not only shattered Israelis but sobered Arab leaders as well, Clinton told his guests, seeing too late the truth in his earlier warnings that the opportunity for peace was perishable. “Now I see what you mean,” Clinton quoted an Arab leader as confessing after Rabin’s death.

At most other such gatherings, however, it was Clinton’s own fate that appeared uppermost in his mind. And the tapes show him presenting his situation with varying combinations of hope, frustration, anger and the stoic fatalism of a man gripped by history.

Three years ago, for example, at a Democratic National Committee luncheon in Louisiana shortly before the disastrous 1994 congressional elections, he likened his problems as a post-Cold War leader to those of Truman struggling to make a reluctant America accept its global responsibilities.

Truman’s popularity plummeted when he blocked the impulse to retreat into isolationism, Clinton said. And when Clinton “hired on to change this country” lest it take a similar turn after the Cold War, he declared in almost-bitter tones, a vitriolic and richly financed opposition was quick to prey on public uncertainty.

Imagine “if half the people who worked for you showed up every day in a deep funk . . . waiting for something horrible to happen. You’d be broke,” he told the business leaders gathered before him. “But that’s what we’re asked to do.”

A little over a year later, addressing a group of financial backers as the 1996 campaign kicked off amid what he continued to see as vicious and unfair attacks by partisan enemies willing to invest millions of dollars in his destruction, Clinton’s natural buoyancy had returned. So had his dogged determination to keep moving toward his goal--whether a grand vision or only his own survival.

“Don’t worry about us. We’re fine. I appreciate all of you who asked about Hillary,” he said, but “I’m a Pollyanna. I believe this country is around here for 200 years because no lie can ever stand for a sustained period of time. That’s what I believe.”

“I think frankly the more negative and darker they are, and the more extreme and mean in their rhetoric they are, the more opportunities they give us, all of us to rise above it . . . and that’s exactly what I intend to do.”