Enemies, A Love Story

The Pact

By Steven M. Gillon

(Oxford, 342 pages, $24.95)

In "The Pact," Steven M. Gillon focuses on the two current Washington figures whose political reputations are most in need of rehabilitation. The first is Bill Clinton, the only president in modern times to have been impeached and, more recently, the gaffe-prone spouse of a presidential contender. The second is Newt Gingrich. Having become speaker of the House in 1995 – for a while, one of the most powerful speakers in history – Mr. Gingrich left Congress only four years later a defeated figure, distrusted by his caucus and trailed by the news that he, too, had carried on an affair with a member of his staff.

Messrs. Clinton and Gingrich were seemingly mortal political enemies, too. But were they really? Mr. Gillon discloses a 1997 meeting between the two whose purpose was to plot the unthinkable: compromise and collaboration. The surreptitious summit took place in an atmosphere of rank partisanship for which Mr. Gingrich could (perhaps proudly) take a great deal of credit.

The GOP's "Contract With America," announced during the 1994 congressional elections, was more than just a program for governing. It was a battle plan to overthrow the Democratic barons of the House; it came replete with talking points, motivational tapes and rhetoric about "renewing American civilization."

It worked. In 1994, the Republicans won a majority in both houses of Congress, and Mr. Gingrich, victory's architect, ascended to the House speakership. His fiery speeches, historic reform of House rules and ubiquitous presence on television dwarfed the Clinton presidency just two years after it had begun.

The great irony, Mr. Gillon notes, is that Mr. Clinton and Mr. Gingrich discovered that they actually liked each other. They were both exhaustingly loquacious politicians and "big idea" men. And both felt at odds with the populist core of their parties. By the summer of 1995, they started meeting regularly and talking on the phone, sometimes several times a day. When word of such amity leaked out, the staff of each side comically scrambled to prevent the two men from spending time alone, fearful that each would sell out his side. Party leaders dispatched Vice President Al Gore and Republican stalwart Dick Armey to act as "minders," charged with keeping the president and the speaker from finding too much common ground.

The bipartisan bonhomie wouldn't last, of course. In the late fall of 1995, Mr. Gingrich staged a standoff over the budget that led to a shutdown of the federal government. The public, suddenly without national parks and school lunches, sided with the White House. Mr. Gingrich emerged from the battle a shrunken figure, belittled by the press and sidelined during the 1996 presidential campaign.

But a year later Mr. Clinton, fresh from a second election victory, was gabbling with Mr. Gingrich again. This time the stakes were higher. Both men had set their sights on creating a bipartisan plan to reform two of the country's biggest unsolved (and insolvent) problems: Social Security and Medicare. Some sort of cooperation was obviously needed. Mr. Gillon – relying on recent interviews with Messrs. Clinton and Gingrich and with a handful of their aides – does a masterly job of recreating the diplomacy aimed at bringing the titans together. Even as they confided in one other, Mr. Gillon tells us, "both men still wondered whether the other was setting a trap."

When they finally met in October 1997 – in the Treaty Room in the East Wing of the White House – Mr. Clinton agreed to push for the creation of private Social Security accounts in return for Mr. Gingrich's promise to abandon a GOP push for further tax cuts. They also made plans for a commission that would recommend more private-sector involvement in Medicare.

Today such a policy shift doesn't sound so revolutionary. But at the time the very idea of such a deal would have caused an uproar in Congress. What no one foresaw was that, only a few weeks later, another secret rendez-vous – this one between Monica Lewinsky and Mr. Clinton – would become public knowledge and destroy the president's credibility, along with any chance of a grand pact with Mr. Gingrich.

Unlike chroniclers of recent history who laboriously recount what most of us remember, Mr. Gillon has real news to tell. He describes a surprising affinity between two apparent political foes and outlines a tantalizing political possibility. At times, though, he seems so smitten by "what might have been" that he overstates the importance of the Clinton-Gingrich dialogue. He is convinced that they were on the brink of forging a great centrist coalition.

But there are reasons to doubt. According to Mr. Gillon, the president had plans to develop "bold, controversial proposals" on the future of Medicare, but he never says what they were. He makes a few remarks about the need to break from "hardliners," but he never explains how Messrs. Clinton and Gingrich thought they could persuade others in their parties to follow them. The two men might have been, in a strange way, political soulmates, but it is less certain that they were trying to create a new political movement. In any case, the pact died before it ever had a chance of coming to life.

Mr. Casse is a senior director of the White House Writers Group, a Washington-based consulting firm.