Anything Goes Read online

  Anything Goes!

  What I've Learned From Pundits, Politicians, And Presidents

  Larry King With Pat Piper

  Introduction

  March 18, 1993. Washington, D.C. The Radio-Television Correspondents Dinner is in full swing at the Washington Hilton. It’s an annual black-tie event where more than a thousand reporters, producers, editors, news writers, bookers, columnists, anchors, and (of course) talk show hosts gather for dinner with members of Congress, ambassadors, and the president of the United States. It is one of the few evenings of the year where absolutely no serious business is conducted other than establishing a working relationship with those in the offices at the networks and those in the offices the networks cover.

  This was Bill Clinton’s first formal dinner with the Washington media since winning the White House five months earlier, with 43 percent of the popular vote. He was the fourteenth president elected without a majority and, as if to prove the point, Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole announced less than twenty-four hours after the votes were counted that the GOP, and not Bill Clinton, represented the 57 percent who had voted either for George Bush or Ross Perot. I remember thinking to myself it’s really true when they say the next election begins as soon as the current one ends. And I had one other thought about this fact: a single word, “unfortunately.”

  But when he was introduced at the dinner that evening, Clinton received an enthusiastic round of applause. I looked around the huge room, and that’s when I noticed something else: Everyone rose to their feet. My take was the people in this room wanted the president to do well. It brought to mind a moment so many years earlier during my late-night radio show, when I had this very conversation with a caller. He was going on about how much he despised the newly elected George Bush, and I said to him, “Don’t you want Bush to succeed, and don’t you think if he succeeds then the country will succeed?” The caller said he didn’t see it that way, and if George Bush does well that means the country goes to hell. While many have said what happens in Washington has nothing whatsoever to do with anything happening any-where else in the country, I think what was occurring in that hotel ballroom was indeed a mirror of America in early 1993. Give the new guy a chance. Even Bob Dole stood during the introduction of the new president and applauded along with everyone else and I believed he wanted Clinton to do well, if only during this speech. And that evening Bill Clinton did well at the podium.

  Never lose your sense of humor. And remember that most of us who do this on both sides do it because we love our country and prefer to believe that an effort made today can make it better tomorrow. It’s a good way to live a life.

  It’s a tough way to live a life is what I was thinking as he spoke. And getting to that point was just as tough. The 1992 presidential election had been an extraordinary time in America. Things occurred that proved pundit after pundit flat-out wrong. It left the candidates bruised, it brought in a wild card third party candidate who defied every expert with infomercials, money, and charts, and captured, if only for a while, America’s imagination and ignited an expectation that we can do better. It brought defeat to an incumbent president who only a year earlier had a 90 percent approval rating. I knew the way we elect and watch and report on a president was going to be different from now on as a result of what had just happened. Talk about understatements.

  But in this room on this night the only issue facing the president and the audience was accessibility. Bill Clinton hadn’t had a news conference since being sworn in two months earlier. And already the pundits and analysts and “experts” were sitting on talk shows, including mine, saying he’s gotta get out there, he’d better start facing the voters, he needs to sell his hundred-day agenda to the public (it was now Day 58 for those who insisted on counting) and blah blah blah. That’s when I realized Bill Clinton was looking right at me.

  You know why I can stiff you on press conferences? Because Larry King liberated me by giving me to the American people directly.

  Everyone at the CNN tables chimed in with encouraging shouts of “all right, Larry!” and slaps on the back and applause, but let me tell you, the rest of the room turned cold real fast. I could feel the glare from everyone else on a single point on the back of my head, sort of like the red laser that falls on a person in video games or the movies before someone else pulls a trigger. So much for the advice about keeping a sense of humor.

  After Clinton finished and while we were all standing and applauding, some yahoo I didn’t know yelled from a few tables away, “Hey Larry, are you the teacher’s pet?” I smiled and looked back toward the podium. And once again my mind was at work thinking how wonderful it is for a poor Jewish kid from Brooklyn to be recognized by the president of the United States while at the same time thinking how horrible it is that a poor Jewish kid from Brooklyn was recognized by the president of the United States. Bill Clinton had talked for about ten minutes and the entire room had only heard one line.

  The room was still freezing when the dinner came to an end and I decided to just get the hell out of the Washington Hilton and walk to my car. The March air felt balmy compared to where I had been for the past three hours. And I realized something as I walked: Bill Clinton was right.

  Something happened in 1992 that changed American politics. Instead of a president holding a primetime news conference and being asked questions by the same people who always ask questions, the venue had changed. I know it wasn’t the result of a bunch of media experts sitting around a table saying let’s bypass Sam Donaldson and all the other White House correspondents and have our guy talk directly to the lady in Des Moines. Media experts aren’t that smart. It was different now. Presidents, and candidates for president, all of whom are quick to tell you they represent the American people, could now answer questions directly from viewers or listeners and therefore circumvent the Washington correspondent filter altogether. It happened when Ross Perot had appeared on my show a year earlier and it happened when Bill Clinton took questions on Good Morning America or appeared on Arsenio Hall and played saxophone and when President Bush was a guest on Today. The medium was the message and the message was very clear: The disillusioned American could ask questions just as well, if not better, of a candidate as could the highly paid reporter. I think that was the story from the 1992 presidential election. All of us had been witness to a strategic shift in the way we approach a candidate and, just as important, in the way a candidate approaches us. And for many in the main ballroom at the Washington Hilton, the idea just made them sick.

  As I drove home that evening I turned the radio to a favorite big band station just in time to hear the words “the world has gone mad today.” It was Cole Porter’s “Anything Goes.”

  That was it. In 1992, we learned what once was the norm is no more. Maybe it happens before every millennium? Maybe that’s why Caesar got knocked off two thousand years earlier? Maybe it’s the result of technology speeding up the world? Maybe it’s just that the only constant in life is that nothing stays the same? Or maybe Cole Porter had just taught the rest of us something?

  By the time I pulled into my condo parking lot the events of the past thirty minutes had made one thing crystal clear: 1992 had been an incredible year and we’ll probably never go through another one like it and Bill Clinton must be glad, as am I, that things will finally slow down.

  I guess you could call that the Understatement of the Millennium.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Bill Who?

  July 20, 1988. I’m sitting in a CNN booth overlooking the floor of the Omni Arena in Atlanta. A couple hundred feet below, five thousand Democrats were preparing to make Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis their nominee for president of the United States. My television show,
Larry King Live, had been preempted in order to carry the speeches, all of which were designed to rally the delegates on the floor, but more important, the national television audience, around the fact this “son of Greek immigrants,” as he described himself again and again and again, was preferable to George Bush.

  And, like most of the delegates, I wasn’t paying much attention. Someone was speaking and speaking and speaking and as he did, I kept thinking how typically democratic this was because every person whom we never knew before and will never see again gets a chance to make their point, get their fifteen minutes of fame (although this guy at the podium was way past that point), and then disappear until the next convention. Democratic conventions are like a Cubs game; there is noise and ethnics. Democrats will tell you 8:45 and they may get around to it by 9:20. Republicans, on the other hand, have orchestrated and smooth-running get-togethers. They tell you 8:45 and it’s 8:45. It’s a bunch of starched shirts and ties. It’s an Amway convention. I guess the difference between the two political parties goes like this: After the speeches at a GOP convention you can always meet for a drink. At a Democratic convention the speeches never end before last call.

  “Who the hell is that guy?” someone asked.

  “He’s doing Hamlet I think,” another said.

  “I don’t think so,” came another answer. “Even Hamlet never went on this long.”

  I thought about where I had been the past hour. CNN decided to send me to the convention floor for “quick hits,” short interviews with newsmakers, delegates, or celebrities who were just taking a stroll, if one can stroll with five thousand others and two thousand members of the media. It had been one of the most bizarre moments I’d ever experienced. At 8:30 I was scheduled to talk to Richard M. Daley, the mayor of Chicago and the son of Mayor Richard J. Daley, who, even after death, held the patent on the idea of machine politics. As I walked to my position I passed Chris Wallace of NBC and Sam Donaldson of ABC and Dan Scanlan of Mutual Radio, who were huddled around someone with name recognition. I remember thinking to myself how hungry they all looked in this Neverland where dogs eat dogs alive.

  At 8:29:10 I’m standing with Mayor Daley waiting to go on the air and looking at two delegates next to me with huge plastic Swiss cheese hats on their heads. This is how we choose the person to serve in the most powerful office in the world. Then two people walk by handing out bags of their state almonds and state candy (and Ohio candy corn looks like the Iowa candy corn from my perspective. And while we’re on the topic, an almond is an almond, so that whole thing is a sham). “Something,” I said to myself, “is off here.”

  All the reporters wore these Mars-like antenna headsets with a producer yelling nonstop in their ears. I was amazed that CBS didn’t get into my CNN headset, and I figured if they did, I’d do what I was told. But I didn’t give anyone any grief, choosing, instead, to just listen for instructions on this maiden voyage into Wackoland. I was told to move closer to the Chicago mayor so we could be in a good camera position, to look in a certain direction, and to ask three questions and then throw it back to Bernie Shaw, who was anchoring in the booth next to where I was now sitting watching all of this. I talked to the mayor and handed off to Bernie. And then a producer said, “Larry, you’re outta here. Good job.” I walked away thinking my next contract with CNN will have a clause for combat pay.

  Actually, many of those who wear the daily media credential on a chain around the neck (yellow is Tuesday, which goes well with a blue shirt, white was Wednesday, which works with stripes) dress the part. I think in the month before any political convention, Banana Republic sells out every khaki vest it makes. Everyone wears these things, pockets loaded with pens and notepads for recording history’s bold moments or, as is the usual case, dinner arrangements (I didn’t own one because my dinners were always at CNN). But the vests were everywhere. And the wearers wore a scowl, as if this assignment placed the burden of mankind on their shoulders. Every time I walked into the Mutual Broadcasting System booth that week I would see three of them in front of a microphone. Made me think I was looking at the Yalta summit or, when they smiled, the Andrews Sisters.

  ———

  I looked at the bank of television monitors to my side. He was still talking. CNN was, of course, carrying the speech. But both NBC and ABC had dumped out with one doing commentary and the other running some kind of documentary about the early years of the son of the Greek immigrants. I knew damn well that if I was getting restless, the folks watching at home were way beyond restless. It brought to mind a moment about a year earlier when the executive producer of 60 Minutes, Don Hewitt, and I had been standing in the green room of Larry King Live before going on the air. Someone wanted to change the channel (away from CNN to a ballgame, if I remember correctly) and Hewitt said to me the most important invention of the twentieth century wasn’t the cure for polio or the Wright brothers’ flight or unleaded gasoline or talk shows. It was the remote control. And at that very moment, nobody could find the remote control. I changed the channel by hand just as an intern produced it from underneath a sofa across the room.

  “You know that clicker?” Hewitt said, looking at me. “It’s going to change the world more than any other thing.”

  For a moment, I thought about it. He was crazy.

  “It sits as a force in your hand. You can change stations with a button. You change advertisers’ income. You force networks to think about every fifteen minutes of programming now.” Hewitt was looking right at me as I did the math: Network execs think four times during my show. This was news.

  It was during a commercial break, and we were changing guests, that I realized Hewitt may be on to something. Here we were shifting into a totally different topic after half an hour on the air. I was ready to keep going with the discussion, but then I’m the guy who spent an entire hour in Atlantic City interviewing Kool and the Gang just trying to figure out the reason for the band’s name. I have no problem interviewing someone for an hour. Watching me interview someone for an hour, however, is a whole different matter. The audience has an “electronic restlessness,” as Washington Post columnist Howard Kurtz once told me, so if they start getting bored with a person or a topic or a segment or a suspender color, the finger goes to the clicker—if it isn’t already positioned on the clicker in the first place. That’s why guests are on and then off and we move to the next topic. Even as early as 1988, we were beginning to eat everything in sight and spit it out while moving to the next food source. The truth is, I didn’t get this at first.

  Hewitt’s theory stayed with me until a few days later, when I decided he wasn’t crazy at all. The clicker is control. If I can’t find it after the maid cleans my California house, all hell breaks loose. When I travel to my house in Virginia, I have to learn all the channel numbers all over again and that makes for some rough moments. I’ve learned we all want control in our life and I can say the happiest people I know are those who can generally control their environment. The clicker gives the bus driver control when he can’t do anything about the weather or tell his wife what to do. But he can control what he watches and what occupies his time. That’s one description about these times: Control is moving away from the outside and toward each of us. The clicker was the first step in that direction.

  Speaking of which, nobody in the Omni could control this guy at the podium, who was still going. I watched gestures from floor managers for him to get off the stage but they were ignored. Maybe, I thought to myself, this was another form of control? Maybe this guy had never before been the center of attention? I felt sorry for him, more so than for those at home watching him. Certainly, as I’ve said, nobody on the floor was paying any attention. Obviously, I reasoned, he must be a hard worker who delivered some key districts to Dukakis during the primaries in order to be given such a prominent platform this evening. And then I thought, “Keep your day job, pal.”

  That was the moment he said, “In closing$#8230;” The arena erupted in applause
and the loudest cheers of the night echoed through the hall. Even the technicians and producers at CNN were yelling. I just shook my head as the name graphic appeared on the air monitor. This wasn’t any ward committee man who had delivered votes doing the telethon. It was the governor of Arkansas: Bill Clinton.

  Even before Clinton took the podium, one television-savvy person knew this was going to be a disaster. Bob Shrum had been a speechwriter for Ted Kennedy and was now a powerful political consultant for numerous congressional and presidential campaigns. He had been given a copy of the Clinton speech a few minutes earlier and could tell right away it was too long. Shrum tried to reach the Dukakis camp to warn them but realized there just wasn’t time to make any changes and, even if there were a few extra minutes for rewrites, someone with the Massachusetts governor must have approved the speech.

  Shrum was right. The Massachusetts governor did approve it. Michael Dukakis told me years later he thought it was a pretty good speech, but in glancing at the pages never realized how long it was going to run. He considered Bill Clinton a guy with a good sense of the audience and if he started to run long, a natural circuit breaker would kick in to telescope the words and thoughts he wanted to convey. Dukakis selected the Arkansas governor to give the nominating speech because he had worked with Bill Clinton on a number of projects with the National Governors’ Association. “He was just an extraordinarily able guy,” he told me. “You couldn’t work with Bill Clinton and not see it. We were philosophically in tune with each other and we took our politics seriously and it was so clear that Bill Clinton was one of the best.” Dukakis knew the man giving that nominating speech was a good communicator and figured his being in front of this national audience that July night was nothing more than nervousness from a new experience.