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Bill Clinton: Coffee AchieverPage 1 | Page 2 On the weekend of the U.S. presidential transition, odds are that you have had your fill of Clinton Administration retrospectives. Clinton himself has often seemed obsessed with his historical legacy, while his many detractors have long seemed equally obsessed with making sure that his legacy is a stained one. Although Clinton ran for president as a moderate "New Democrat," he has always managed to be a polarizing figure, and you have plenty of company if you have an extreme opinion on him as a president or a person. But love him or hate him, if you are a coffee lover, you have something in common with Clinton; he belongs to our coffee-drinking ranks. This weekend, Caffeine Nation's most notorious citizen will vacate his home of the last eight years at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C. We at INeedCoffee hope that you can forgive us for adding our retrospective two cents' worth -- it may be a somewhat restricted perspective through which we review Clinton's presidency, but there is plenty of coffee-related material for us to work with.
Maxwell White House The departure of a president causes a bureaucratic exodus of sorts, as out with the president go numerous executive appointees, advisers, and other White House personnel. While some Clinton underlings have stayed aboard through the eleventh hour, others have long since moved on to other lines of work. Among those long gone is George Stephanopoulos, who joined the Clinton campaign at the age of 30 in 1991, and served as White House Communications Director and Special Assistant to the President after Clinton's election. Stephanopoulos chronicled the thrills and agonies of working for the Clinton campaign and White House staff in his autobiographical All Too Human. The book is rife with references to coffee, as Stephanopoulos is a Coffee Achiever in his own right, by his own admission scarcely able to function in the morning until the second cup of coffee. Perhaps this is why he had a keen eye for the coffee-drinking habits of Clinton, saying: I knew the President's morning routine as well as I knew my own. After stretching on the patio, Clinton would walk through the pantry for a bottle of water and a cup of coffee, then cool down by puttering around his desk or flipping through the newspapers on [secretary] Betty[ Currie]'s credenza. Few journalists have Washington insider credentials that can rival those of Bob Woodward, who with his tag-team partner Carl Bernstein was primarily responsible for exposing the Watergate-related corruption of the Richard Nixon Administration in the early 1970s. Woodward's 1994 book The Agenda is an often unflattering look at the 1992 Clinton campaign and the early days of the Clinton White House, during which the President, First Lady, and White House staff receive rude awakenings as to the realities of unleashing their budgetary agenda on a resistant Washington establishment. When Clinton wants to call a few exclusive advisers to a strategy meeting, he chooses the solarium as the location, described in the following passage from The Agenda: The meeting was to be held in the White House solarium, a sun parlor or summer room with bays of glass windows on three sides, perched on top of the White House. Calvin Coolidge's wife had called a smaller version of the room the "sky parlor," and President Nixon had called it the California Room. During the 1992 transition, President Reagan had told Clinton that the solarium was his favorite White House room. He had recovered there from his bullet wound after the 1981 assassination attempt, Reagan had explained. For Clinton and his longtime advisers, the room most resembled the informality of the basement of the Arkansas Governor's Mansion. A kitchenette and a large, PTA-sized coffeepot substituted for servants. The factual Clinton seems to prefer access to a vast coffee reservoir; the fictional Clinton had a similar craving for coffee. I speak, of course, of Jack Staton of the novel Primary Colors. Soon after its publication in 1996, Primary Colors kept the world guessing for months as to the identity of its then-anonymous author, later revealed to be Joe Klein, a frequent writer for the New Yorker. Before Klein confessed to the act, however, it was still obvious that the book was the work of a true insider in the 1992 campaign, and the book, despite its claim to be "a work of fiction and. . . [n]one of these events ever happened," was based in very large part Clinton's road to victory in the Democratic primary and employs only the slimmest of artistic licenses. Stanton, a charismatic southern governor running in the presidential primary who withstands periodic bimbo eruptions and draft-dodging allegations, is a flimsily disguised Bill Clinton. And like the real-life figure he so resembles, Stanton is a coffee drinker. Observe the following exchange between Stanton and Henry Burton, the book's narrator and Stanton's campaign aide: "Henry, they are going to kill me with trash," Stanton said the next morning, his face blotchy and reddening, about to blow. "We gotta stop this." He looked at me as if it were an assignment: Stop this. Turn back the tide. He looked awful, as if he'd been up all night. He had a cup of coffee in one hand and a doughnut in the other. He inhaled the doughnut. Two bites. Page 1 | Page 2 |
