When Jesse Helms, incoming chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, questioned Bill Clinton's fitness to be commander in chief, the president was annoyed but stayed calm. When Helms insulted the president a second time last week -- claiming that Clinton was so unpopular he would need a bodyguard if he visited North Carolina military bases -- the president was deeply offended. The remarks, he told aides, were outrageously mean-spirited. "I'm ready to go to North Carolina right now," Clinton fumed. But White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta changed the president's mind. "We can't just react," Panetta warned, "every time Jesse Helms decides to push his crazy buttons." So, instead of Clinton playing macho man, it was Panetta who condemned the conservative senator's "dangerous and irresponsible" statements. The next day, Helms admitted his remarks were a mistake.
Leon Panetta is fast becoming the White House's indispensable man. Not only has he brought a new toughness and savvy to the Clinton team, he has increased efficiency, centralized decision making and established, at least for now, a middle-of-the-road orientation. "For the first time since we got here," says a senior White House official, "we have a center of the universe. Everything goes through Leon." One of his other strengths is an intimate knowledge of Capitol Hill, where he served in the House of Representatives for 16 years and chaired the House Budget Committee. Last week, Panetta helped broker a deal with Senate Republican leader Bob Dole that appeared to ensure passage of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, a cornerstone of the administration's economic agenda (story, Page 10).
Yet Panetta's task of resurrecting the Clinton presidency is daunting. Friends say Clinton remains deeply hurt by the GOP landslide in the November election, and he is still unsure whether to interpret the verdict as a repudiation of his policies. While he ruminates, his staff is trying to hammer out the administration's 1996 budget proposal, even though the president has yet to set priorities or settle the conflicts among his aides over middle-class tax relief, comprehensive health care reform and other fundamental issues. In addition, Clinton has yet to devise a political strategy for dealing with the resurgent Republican majority in Congress that will challenge him on issues ranging from prayer in schools to a balanced-budget amendment. Democrats, meanwhile, fear that Clinton's free-form brand of stewardship will cause another debacle in the 1996 election, so they seem less likely to follow his lead.
With Clinton seemingly unable to chart a clear course, the job of setting directions has fallen increasingly to Panetta. "The fundamental theme we need to emphasize," Panetta told U.S. News, "is that President Clinton is working to improve the lives of the average citizens of this country." He has advised the president to focus on a small number of issues, including welfare reform and a scaled-back health care reform proposal. Panetta also urges Clinton to avoid off-the-cuff remarks that distract attention from the administration's main themes and to act more "presidential" by participating in high-toned events such as last week's White House meetings with Ukrainian President Leonid Kuchma. No one is sure, however, whether Clinton will follow Panetta's sensible suggestions over the long haul.
One of Panetta's major aims for 1995 is to bring Clinton more credit for the "reinventing government" initiative that Vice President Al Gore has been handling, with little publicity, for the past two years. Under Panetta's scenario, Clinton will regularly stage events calling attention to the administration's effort to streamline bureaucracy and save money.
Setting the agenda. To emphasize that the White House will not surrender leadership to the Republicans, Panetta is considering a plan to reschedule Clinton's State of the Union address from late January to the beginning of the month. Otherwise, Panetta fears, the Republican-controlled Congress, which convenes on January 3, will get too much of a head start in setting the national agenda. The president, Clinton advisers say, is likely to agree.
Not that Panetta always gets his way. He recommended that Clinton stay home to plan his domestic initiatives rather than go to Budapest for next week's international conference on security and economics. But the president overruled him. Clinton plans to fly nearly nine hours to make a seven-hour stop in the Hungarian capital, largely because several of the other leaders asked him to attend. And in an early test of Panetta's authority, Clinton undercut his chief of staff last summer when Panetta sought to demote Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers. Myers made a last-minute appeal to the president and got a reprieve.
Despite the setbacks, Panetta is much tougher in running the White House than was his courtly predecessor, Mack McLarty. Since he took over last June, he rescinded most staffers' "drop-in" privileges at the Oval Office because such unscheduled conversations took up too much of Clinton's time. Now Panetta interviews virtually everyone who visits the Oval Office -- in advance -- so he knows what the president is hearing from others. When administration officials sought to discuss health care reform with Clinton recently -- which would have been routine a year ago -- Panetta nixed the session, saying their proposals were unrealistic.
Check marks, doodles and arrows. Unlike other White House aides who prefer free-form management, Panetta, formerly Clinton's budget director, sits down each evening in his spacious suite and makes a list of things to do in the next 24 hours. Using a blue Berol pen, he fills at least one full page of a yellow legal pad with 20 or 30 assignments for himself. The next morning, he methodically begins checking off items as he addresses each assignment. By day's end, the list is covered with check marks, doodles, notes and arrows linking one project to another. Some aides see Panetta's list as a road map through the labyrinthine patterns of decision making in Clinton's White House, but they can't make much sense of it. "Whatever he's doing," says a once skeptical Clinton adviser, "it seems to be working."
Panetta's steadiness will be even more important to Clinton this winter because of the imminent departures of several senior advisers. Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy plans to leave office in January amid allegations he accepted too many corporate freebies. And pressure is building from Democratic moderates and conservative Christians to force the resignation of Joycelyn Elders as surgeon general because of her liberal views on distribution of condoms in schools and other issues. Some in the White House predict that Clinton soon will force the resignation of Director of Central Intelligence James Woolsey because of many recent embarrassments involving his agency. And Panetta is likely to order the long-awaited reshuffling of the White House staff, especially the much criticized media operation.
For his part, Panetta tells friends that he agrees with the president that Washington has become a hostile, vindictive place where politicians -- such as Jesse Helms -- take pleasure in "slicing down" the presidency. Panetta recently framed on his office wall a photograph of director Frank Capra with actor James Stewart at the Lincoln Memorial, where they were filming Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Friends say the movie, which centers on the triumph of innocence over cynicism, is one of Panetta's favorites.
