This is a legitimate anxiety for someone departing the grit of governing a state for the ruffles-and-flourishes, at-your-service world of the White House. And Clinton is far from the first to express it, although, despite their resolve to the contrary, most of our presidents do in time get cut off from experiences and information they sorely need. Still, I think Clinton, with his vast, well-tended network of politically attentive friends and his itch for communicating with practically everyone in the world will have less trouble here than most. And, anyway, staying in touch is only the number two problem of this kind for the man in the White House. Number one, and much harder, is staying human.
Presidents, often pitifully, are aware of this in some way, but at a loss to know what to do about it. So they, with the help of their misguided handlers, end up staging stupid tableaux which are (1) meant to make the fellow look like just any ordinary American down the block from you, but (2) only emphasize, by their very artifice, the fact that he is not. I’m thinking of George Bush buying those socks at Penney’s, Jimmy Carter descending on certain selected middle-class folk as a houseguest and then, to much note, making his own bed. But presidents don’t have to make their own beds or buy their own socks at Penney’s or anywhere else, and all this sort of thing does is make people laugh or avert their gaze. It doesn’t help a president retain his endangered capacity after a while to react to other people normally or to enter into normal give and take.
What makes it so hard for a president to stay human is the way people treat him the minute he ascends to office. He is spoiled. He is revered. He is granted an incredible amount of power, not of the practical political kind so much as the power to make his immediate personal convenience and interest override those of everyone else in the room or the building or the city. I watched Clinton shortly after he took his seat at the Inaugural parade and wondered how he must feel suddenly to have all those people living for just a millisecond of his notice, working like the dickens just to please him, shouting his name or, if they were the military troops marching smartly past, turning their heads at precisely the right moment to salute his presence. I figured he must have been shocked, humbled, overwhelmed. I don’t see how he could fail to be. The trouble is, though, sooner or later most of them get used to it. They too come to accept, at least implicitly, that for the others present at any given moment there is no higher purpose than to ensure the president’s comfort and well-being.
Invariably, of course, some of this rubs off on a president’s top aides. You could see some pretty disgusting sights at the parties in Washington last week, as social lions, media types, etc., ordinarily a little snooty and standoffish themselves, gravitated shamelessly and with unaccustomed puppy-dog smiles to all the purported new Clinton big shots, laughing a little too quickly at their jokes, nodding ostentatiously in premature agreement with their every word. Yuck. If anything is certain, it is that a handful of these newly lionized officials will get in some trouble before the thing is over. And likely as not it will be because they have been seduced into accepting the fatal premise of their kind in Washington concerning dubious actions: if I do it, it can’t be wrong. This, magnified many times over, is among the occupational hazards of the presidency itself.
It is in this context that I have been thinking this week about the decision to have Hillary Clinton occupy a West Wing office near the president’s for her policy activity, as distinct from the traditional East Wing one, and also the appointment to be White House chief of staff of Thomas McLarty, perhaps the president’s oldest pal (their friendship is said to date from kindergarten). The two moves have been criticized on different grounds: Hillary Clinton’s presence prompts the usual worries about a manipulative First Lady, unaccountable, secret power and the rest; McLarty’s appointment has provoked much public worry in the media and elsewhere over the man’s evident lack of Washington experience, especially experience in the kind of Washington knifework that comes in so handy for a chief of staff.
I don’t want to get into all that here. I just want to note that there is an upside to the appointments and the placing of these two near Clinton. Their proximity during the workday surely goes as far as anything possibly could to guarantee that Clinton will not be able to forget who he is or to get a swelled head or to lose his gift for the human encounter. He will not be allowed merely to pronounce, as distinct from trying also to persuade. I don’t know how either McLarty or Hillary Clinton will behave in group meetings with the president. I would expect a certain decorum. But Hillary Clinton is the only person who will be around the president throughout his working day who can variously in one-on-one sessions call him “Darling,” “Bill,” “You” and “You idiot.” Likewise, with respect to McLarty, it’s awfully hard to put on airs or start thinking of yourself in the third person or doing any of those other things that are a sign of trouble, with someone who saw you spill your apple juice in first grade.
Recent presidencies have done a great deal to deflate the awesome-burden, loneliness-of-command imagery that used so assiduously to be promoted from the White House. And after some truly bruising fights with Congress and the courts, the executive branch has been trimmed back in its authority from those earlier days when it was understood that the White House could get away with just about anything it wanted. Moreover (witness the uproar over Zoe Baird) the explosion of call-in media has injected a whole new element into public pressure on a chief executive. But while we may have got rid of the imperial presidency, we still do everything in our power to create an imperial president. It costs both him and us plenty. Clinton should be on guard.
