Love Story

When George Stephanopoulos was 4, he began serving as an altar boy at his father’s church. Clearly, he enjoyed the rituals--the candles, the sacrament, the incense. “Maybe one reason I’ve never been queasy about the grubby work of politics, the mechanics of running campaigns and making laws, is that I spent so many of my early days behind the altar screen--where my father’s prayers were my cues,” he writes in “All Too Human,” a memoir of the young aide’s travails in the Clinton White House. When the father said “Agios o Theos,” George knew to get the candles. When the priest intoned, “Wisdom, let us attend,” the son obediently got the cross. When the father praised the Father, the altar boy heated the water for Holy Communion. “Behind the screen, I learned to stay composed in the presence of power and was swayed by the illusion of indispensability.”

Years later, when his rivals were trying to limit his influence at the White House, Stephanopoulos was slow to see their machinations behind the scenes. He learned from the Washington Post, while drinking his coffee one morning in September 1994, that a small plane piloted by a depressed veteran had crashed into the White House. That no one had notified him at the time was evidence of lost power. Still, he clung to the “illusion of indispensability.” “No way,” he thought. “How could this happen? How come nobody called me?” How, indeed?

The only real disclosure in this sad memoir is that a bright, handsome young man, full of ambition and confidence, made his way to power with partisan tactics and a tin ear for diplomacy, both personal and political. That is hardly a novel theme, as both Shakespeare and Hollywood long ago discovered. What is trite, in fact, is how familiar the themes of this self-described “political education” seem: an idealist who gravitated toward politics instead of the priesthood, a liberal who chose to join forces with a pragmatist, an enthusiast who grew depressed in the proximity of power. And the only White House secrets betrayed here are of Stephanopolous’ many mistakes. As Clinton says to Stephanopoulos, “We hired too many young people in this White House who are smart but not wise.”

Stephanopoulos’ judgment was so often wrong that it is a wonder he lasted four years. Repeatedly, as rival Dick Morris steered Clinton toward the political center in ways that boosted the president’s sagging popularity, Stephanopoulos clung to a partisan liberal profile, attaining the look of a shrill obstructionist. He urged Clinton not to recommend a balanced budget, as that would be too much of a sop to Republicans. And when Clinton, in a moment of calculated theater, told a Texas audience that he thought he had raised their taxes too much--arguably the single most important contribution to Clinton’s political rehabilitation--Stephanopoulos wanted him to retract it.

Even on tactical political decisions--the kind for which Stephanopoulos had been groomed as a key aide to House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt (D-Mo.)--the tally of miscalls is impressive. He encouraged Clinton to campaign hard in mid-term elections in 1994, not appreciating that given Clinton’s low standing in the polls, this was one year to keep him home in a Rose Garden strategy. Hoping to protect Clinton, Stephanopoulos told him on a trip to Indonesia to duck a question on school prayer instead of sticking to his usual formulation that he supported voluntary prayer in the schools. “It made it look like he was flip-flopping on a matter of bedrock political principle,” Stephanopoulos writes on the impact of that bad advice. “It took us two days to clean up the mess of stories about how Clinton had lost his political and moral compass.” And, the worse sin of all from the Clintons’ viewpoint, Stephanopoulos was a primary source for Bob Woodward’s book, “The Agenda,” which showcased an undisciplined White House decision-making process. Woodward quoted Stephanopoulos as saying of Clinton, “The worst thing about him is that he never makes a decision.” Neither Clinton nor his wife, Hillary, much trusted him after that, and he admits to the crime of naively--and vainly--thinking he could spin Woodward. An old Washington tale: the seducer and the seduced.

The mistakes on Monica-gate were not his alone, but in retrospect and in cold print they serve as an astonishing mea culpa of sorry judgment. When the Whitewater scandal broke, Stephanopoulos convinced Clinton--after overcoming strenuous objections from the first lady--to ask that a special prosecutor be named. And after Paula Jones filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against the president, her lawyers suggested a deal in which the president would read an innocuous public statement confirming that the two had met and apologizing for any defamatory statements about Jones by him or his staff. “Although it would later seem like a small price to pay, at the time it appeared unacceptable,” he writes. After the Jones case begat the Starr investigation, which led to impeachment proceedings, the White House came to regret the decision. “But who knew? In May of 1994, Monica Lewinsky was still in college.”

If Stephanopoulos’ political judgment was off, that is understandable, forgivable: as the title suggests, “All Too Human.” What is harder to understand is the book’s matter-of-fact tone of confession, as if it is a chronicling rather than an accounting. So detached is the retelling that one wonders if the mea culpa is not merely part of the spin, yet another White House effort to win sympathy from voters.

Clinton gave Stephanopoulos a national platform, literally offering him the podium in the White House briefing room where he proved so ill-suited to be press secretary. Theirs was something of an arranged marriage, brokered by Stephanopoulos. The young photogenic aide interviewed several presidential candidates he might work for in 1991, selecting Clinton over Bob Kerrey because, among other reasons, the Nebraska senator’s staff seemed too awe-struck about their man. The Kerrey staff viewed the senator as a cause, Stephanopoulos reports with some disdain. Stephanopoulos didn’t want a cause, he wanted a horse to ride to the top, one reason Hillary Clinton, according to his own account, distrusted him early. “You never believed in us,” she tells him tearfully when the Whitewater scandal envelops the White House and puts her on the defensive.

There is no question that Stephanopoulos blames Hillary for many of the mistakes in the Clinton White House. He contrasts Hillary’s out front activism with his own mother’s view of her role as a priest’s wife. “The presbytera is a kind of first lady,” he writes. “She has an official role as hostess and helpmate but can’t let people get the idea she’s assuming authority that isn’t hers.” For Stephanopoulos, having a “co-president” with veto power over decisions complicated the process. In the case of Hillary Rodham Clinton, having a defensive lawyer in that role was all but paralyzing. When reporters first started asking about the Clintons’ investment in a resort development called Whitewater, “Hillary’s litigator instincts made her hunker down--a pattern began of revealing as little as possible as slowly as possible, which was stupid, because the underlying information--about Hillary’s investments and legal practice--was embarrassing but not scandalous.” When the Clintons assumed office, it was Hillary who suggested closing the door between the press room and the press secretary’s offices, an early gambit in her broader plan to move the news media to the Old Executive Office Building next door.

But Stephanopoulos’ own hubris--not Hillary’s machinations or Bill’s dissembling--is the revelation here. And the telling is all the more poignant in that it comes from his own pen. When New York governor Mario Cuomo withdrew from consideration as a Clinton Supreme Court nominee, Stephanopoulos recounts that the administration weighed naming the first Latino justice but decided against it because, Stephanopoulos writes unashamedly, “demand for diversity was less fashionable in June than it had been in December.” Later, during a particularly frustrating period when the White House felt under siege, he smugly confides, “I was starting to take it all personally. The American people were rejecting the Congress I worked for, the president I helped elect, and the policies I cared about most. But they couldn’t take away Air Force One.” He then provides a glowing account of how the airplane is outfitted (“Couches flanked by bowls of fresh fruit and candy in the corridors, a conference room with two TVs in the wall and a library of first-run movies; offices with computers, fax machines, copiers and phones; a full kitchen crew serving hot meals and cold drinks around the clock.”

The luxuries of Air Force One, described so reverentially here, are visible signs of great power, much as the icon screens and golden churches were in his childhood. But something in the preoccupation with symbols seems to have lessened Stephanopoulos’ interest in the sermon. The night before a landmark Mideast summit on the White House lawn, Stephanopoulos woke worried about what time to open the gates, what to do if it rained. “The president was doing his job, and I was doing mine--a job I first learned in my father’s church. That morning, Clinton would preside at a kind of liturgy on the White House lawn. I was his altar boy, hoping to serve peace by serving my president--sweating the details.”

Every president needs a good detail man, and Stephanopoulos is not the first to glorify his own role while serving at the White House. Alexander Haig perhaps set the stage for this kind of memoir with a book defending his own somewhat alarming assertion, just after President Reagan was shot in 1981, that “I am in control here.” But Stephanopoulos is surely the first to broadcast his own failings by way of illuminating what he views as the greater flaws of the man he served. The perfect memoir for the “me” generation, “All Too Human” tells us more about the aide than about the president.