Enablers And Enforcers: The Two White House Cultures
By Richard Lacayo
(TIME, February 2) -- From the first days of the first term, the Clinton White House
has been two places. On one side is the First Lady's operation,
which includes Hillary and her immediate staff, a buttoned-down
culture in which meetings are brief and businesslike, hallway
encounters are pleasantly reserved, and there is regular family
time in the evening. And then there's Bill's Big Easy. The
President is more orderly now than in his first term, when he
favored rambling meetings and corridors crowded with young
aides. But he's still Bill Clinton. Even after Hillary has
turned in for the night, he's prone to drift to the West Wing
offices--the presidential equivalent of a walk on the wild
side--for late-night bull sessions.
All of which means there has always been plenty about Bill's
White House for Hillary's White House to keep an eye on, a
slightly unbuckled atmosphere in which sex, if not exactly a
certainty, is not exactly unthinkable. When he went to the White
House in 1993 as one of the youngest American Presidents ever,
Clinton attracted a flock of aides and interns just out of
college: males who regarded mild flirtation as harmless fun,
females who seemed to enjoy the attention. And whatever lessons
he drew from the Gennifer Flowers embarrassment, Clinton has
never felt it necessary to pretend that good-looking women are
beyond his notice. Within the first months of his first term,
the West Wing was crammed with them, pretty young interns "who
had nothing better on their resumes than their good looks," says
a woman who served in a senior policy job. "This is a President
who appeals to groupies."
Some Clinton advisers now wonder if they should have done more
to keep a lid on things. For a man with Clinton's lively libido,
the West Wing presented a garden of temptation. Did it lead him
over the edge? "It wasn't that aides arranged this
[environment]," says a former official. "It's that they didn't
do much to stop it. They didn't want to get cut out or lose
their standing, or they feared his blue-temper rages."
In that provocative climate, the No. 1 keeper of good order was
Evelyn Lieberman. A Hillary operative in Bill's world, she went
to the White House in 1993 as the First Lady's assistant, then
moved up three years later to become Clinton's deputy chief of
staff. Until she left that job in December 1996 to head the
Voice of America, her White House duties could include anything
from arranging furniture to making sure aides had the
President's briefing papers ready. But Lieberman also put a
brake on the freewheeling Clinton kids. She would regularly
upbraid interns for wearing open-toed shoes or using the
upstairs rest room that she wanted reserved for guests. Under
her regime, hemlines fell among female interns, and blouses were
buttoned. Says an aide: "Evelyn was the enforcer."
She was a kind of minesweeper too. Ever alert for good-looking
female aides who might be hanging around the President too much,
Lieberman gave them the boot before they could make trouble. A
former White House aide told TIME that in late 1995 and early
1996, senior female staff members working for Lieberman
transferred at least two pretty young women to jobs outside the
White House because Clinton kept dropping by to flirt. When he
"got too chatty with somebody, usually someone with a large
chest, a couple of the older women would see she got moved,"
says the aide. That's what happened to Lewinsky. Sources say it
was Lieberman who arranged to have the coltish intern
transferred to the Pentagon after Lieberman concluded she was
spending too much time in the West Wing.
Recovering alcoholics sometimes talk about enablers, the people
who help them go on drinking, either by encouraging them
outright or by cleaning up after them. When it comes to women,
Clinton has had a lifetime of enablers--not just the friends who
egged him on but also the ones who helped him sidestep
accusations. During the '92 campaign, aide Betsey Wright used to
fend off "bimbo eruptions," charges about women from his
Arkansas days. Senior adviser Bruce Lindsey used to advise
flight attendants on the campaign plane to stay out of range of
news cameras when Clinton disembarked. If the claims about
Lewinsky are true, then what Clinton needed around him was more
Evelyn Liebermans and fewer back-slapping buddies and loyal
members of his cleanup crew. If it takes a village to raise a
child, maybe it takes a circle of complicit friends to help a
grown man go on acting like a teenager.
-- Reported by Ann Blackman, Michael Duffy and Douglas
Waller/Washington
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