Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton Read Online Free

allegations about the trashing of the White House, the Old Executive Office Building next door, and the presidential airplane. Nearly every story on the subject featured a “close Bush adviser,” a “high-level Bush staffer,” or some similarly unnamed source talking about the awful destruction perpetrated by those Clinton people.
    To come under this kind of sustained attack by the White House was a signal of how far and how suddenly Clinton had fallen. Only days before, the vast communications operation of the presidency would have served and protected him. Now he could rely on nothing even resembling that mighty bureaucratic apparatus—only a tiny temporary office that sat, ironically enough, across the street from the White House in a townhouse on Jackson Place.
    Directed by Karen Tramontano, who had served as a special assistant to the president, the Clinton “transition office” consisted mainly of a few aides on six-month stipends from the federal government. Still on hand was Betty Currie, who had famously endured crisis after crisis, and more than one grand jury appearance, as Clinton’s personal secretary, along with Laura Graham, who had worked on the White House scheduling team, Mary Morrison, who had helped to run Oval Office operations, and former White House social secretary Capricia Marshall, a Hillary confidante who served more as a consultant than a full-time employee—plus several employees who continued as they had before, handling correspondence from the tens of thousands of people on the Clintons’ various lists.
    A highly competent executive originally recruited from a top position in the labor movement by White House chief of staff John Podesta, Tramontano had never overseen media relations, let alone a full-blown crisis. Receiving phone calls every few minutes from reporters who had managed to find her, demanding responses on the Rich pardon, vandalism in the White House, and Hillary’s gift registry, she lacked the skills and experience to respond effectively.
    In the final weeks before the end of his presidency, Clinton had remained busy and preoccupied, with very little time devoted to what might come after. He and Podesta had hastily assembled the transition office, approaching Tramontano to run it less than a month before Clinton left the White House. They hadn’t anticipated the need for a press secretary—let alone a war room. Now Clinton sat isolated in Chappaqua, hundreds of miles from the transition office, and nobody there could begin to help him cope with a burgeoning public relations disaster.
    Tramontano did what she could under the circumstances. She knew how to pick up the phone and reach officials in the White House, and within a day or so after the vandalism stories broke, she placed an irritated call to Andrew Card, Bush’s chief of staff. She had been in the White House during those final days; she knew that the trashing tales were wholly fabricated or at most terribly exaggerated. It was also obvious to her that whatever Fleischer might say, those stories emanated directly from the highest levels of Bush’s staff.
    But rather than return her call, Card told his deputy Joseph Hagin to ring Tramontano back—and a “senior Bush official” instantly leaked word of the exchange to a CNN White House reporter. Then Fleischer described the conversation between Tramontano and Hagin to the White House press corps, complete with yet more insinuations of serious misconduct.
    According to Fleischer, Hagin described “plural incidents” of vandalism to the Clinton aide, although he would not say what those incidents were. A “senior Bush aide” confirmed to CNN that the incidents had occurred mostly in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, but that some also took place in the West Wing. Yet while his colleagues kept whispering poison, Fleischer primly remarked that the White House had tried to minimize the entire flap from the beginning and “move