Politics

Reporters Remember The Clinton Years

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

January 18, 2001 / 11:39 AM EST / CBS

Whether you love him or hate him, President William Jefferson Clinton has certainly left an indelible mark on America. For some perspective on his presidency, we asked each of the CBS News White House correspondents who have covered him to share their thoughts on the Clinton legacy.

Susan Spencer, CBS News White House correspondent, 1992-93: "Bill Clinton hits the White House (in 1993) and it is like somebody took a bunch of ice cubes and threw them at you. It was a sense of idealism, of making waves, of doing things differently, of 'let's go!'."

Bill Plante, CBS News White House correspondent, 1992-2001: "The first year was no picnic. He made a series of disastrous missteps. An early example, saying they would end discrimination against gays in the military."

Spencer: "What a disaster. This was not an issue that the country needed for him to tackle first. He named his wife, Hillary, to head the healthcare effort. It was too much, too far away from the usual role of the first lady for people to accept. He's the first baby boom president. It was the first time, I think, that a lot of the White House reporters were covering a president who was their own age, and, I think, frankly, that a lot of them resented it."

Plante: "But then they did things like fire members of the travel office. Things happened to them — their friend Vince Foster, who was Deputy White House council, committed suicide."

Spencer: "They withheld information, they delayed telling people things, they created the impression that there was something else that had happened here. And it was the sort of performance that they repeated again later on in any number of situations."

Plante: "A special council was named at the request of the Justice Department to look into the so-called Whitewater allegations."

Spencer: "On the other hand, when you look back over the first year, the budget got passed and many would argue that that budget laid the foundation for the economic recovery. The family medical leave act was on of the first things that Clinton signed. That's had tremendous repercussions ever since. It is something I think that he was most proud of and it was a promise kept."

Rita Braver, CBS News White House correspondent, 1993-97: "When I came into the White House it was September of '93 and there was one gigantic agenda item and that was health care. You know when the president gave that speech everyone in the country seemed to get excited. And do you remember when he pulled out that card and said 'This card will give us comprehensive care'? But they weren't prepared for the level of lobbying (by opponents). I think the president learned that you can be too ambitious about what you want to accomplish and even when people say they want something, you can frighten people."

Plante: "The defeat of the Democrats by the Republicans in Congress (in midterm elections in 1994really was a low point for Clinton. He was reduced to telling us in a press conference, 'The president is relevant here.' The turning point for Clinton was probably the Oklahoma City bombing. It gave him the chance to act presidential."

Braver: "But once the Republicans tried to execute their Contract with America and once that led to the shutting of the government, Clinton was able to stand up and look as if he were standing for the American people against the Republican Congress."

Mark Knoller, CBS News White House correspondent, 1992-2001: "He joined up again with an old political advisor, Dick Morris, who advised him on positioning himself on a number of issues that were really stealing those issues from Republicans."

Plante: "The outstanding example, obviously, is Clinton's signing the welfare reform act of 1996."

Knoller: "That set him up marvelously for re-election in 1996. Bill Clinton is a masterful politician. He knows how to handle people. He knows how to reach out to them, and that is one of the secrets of Bill Clinton's success."

Plante: "He used relationships that he forged with people in Ireland, Israel and Russia and various other places around the world to sort of extend the American ideal of democracy or to try and to settle conflicts. In some places it worked, sort of, and in others it didn't."

Knoller: "When Rabin was assassinated in 1995 it was an enormous blow to Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton coined the phrase in Hebrew shalom khavere, goodbye friend. In Kosovo, Clinton gathered NATO for a task it had never engaged in before. They stopped ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. Bill Clinton is enormously proud of that."

Plante: "Bill Clinton used the force of his personality to conduct foreign affairs as politics on a global scale."

Braver: "Bill Clinton has this level of personal magnetism that cannot be denied."

Spencer: "He is voracious in his reading and knows everything about everything."

Knoller: "Even Newt Gingrich once said about Bill Clinton, he's a hard guy not to like."

Scott Pelley, CBS News White House correspondent, 1997-99: "We truly believed (in 1996), as is the case in most second terms for presidents, that the president would be spending a great deal of time overseas and that foreign policy would be his major agenda. Little did we know…"

Plante: "Late in 1997 the Supreme Court ruled that Paula Jones could pursue her lawsuit against the president while he was in office. And it led to the deposition."

Pelley: "He had to make a decision and I think it's indicative of the president's character that he made the wrong decision. He decided to lie." (Saying "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.")

Pelley: "It was a wildfire that flashed into the White House, and there was a mad scramble to try and bring in under control. And then we learn tat the gifts the president bought Miss Lewinsky ended up under the president's secretary's bed. I mean, this begins to look like a conspiracy to obstruct justice. Suddenly it mattered whether the president had had an affair, because that was at the heart of the questions that he had been asked under oath.

"Whatever you think of Bill Clinton there is one thing that is true: he is not a quitter. He's never quit anything in his life. And when it was clear that he was going to be impeached you can bet that he was going to dig in and he was going to do anything and everything that he had to do to survive. They fought on the legal front, on the political front, and most importantly in the court of public opinion — where they knew the fight would be won or lost."

Knoller: "When we asked him a few months after the impeachment, did you ever consider resigning? He said, 'it never crossed my mind.' Which is an amazing thing to say."

John Roberts, CBS News White House correspondent, 1999-2001: "When I came to the White House, I think there was a sense among the Clinton administration and the president in particular that he had ridden the tiger and he had won. And I think he saw that as a mandate to work until the last minute of the last hour of the last day of his presidency to try to drive through his legislative agenda."

Plante: "If you asked Bill Clinton about his presidency the first thing he will cite is the economy."

Knoller: "(The) crime rate is down, the welfare rolls are down. Bill Clinton thinks he has done a lot of good and it's difficult to argue with the numbers."

Roberts: "He feels in some ways he handed his deputy (Al Gore) the presidency on a silver platter and he dropped it."

Plante: "And he leaves office with far fewer Democrats in state houses and state legislatures than there were in 1992."

Knoller: "I think Bill Clinton will be remembered as perhaps the most masterful politician since FDR, if not including FDR."

Roberts: "A man who had the uncanny ability to take his weaknesses and turn them into strengths, a man who could take his enemies and turn them into assets."

Pelley: "But that's the president, isn't it? I mean, that's President Clinton: impossible not to like him."