Right: Sen. John McCain. Left: G. Gordon Liddy.

Carl Bernstein
CNN Political Analyst

Does John McCain "pal around with terrorists?"

Certainly McCain's continuing "association" and relationship with the convicted Watergate burglar and domestic terrorist G. Gordon Liddy might suggest that is the case, if we are to apply the standards drawn by the McCain campaign.

In 1998, Liddy gave a fundraiser in his Scottsdale, Arizona home for McCain's senatorial re-election campaign - the two posed for photographs together; and as recently as May, 2007, as a presidential candidate, McCain was a guest on Liddy's syndicated radio show. Inexplicably, McCain heaped praise on his host's values. During the segment, McCain said he was "proud" of Liddy, and praised Liddy's "adherence to the principles and philosophies that keep our nation great."

Which of Liddy's "principles and philosophies" was McCain referring to? Liddy's advocacy of break-ins? Firebombings? Assassinations? Kidnappings? Taking target practice with figures nicknamed Bill and Hillary?

Read more...

Carl Bernstein
AC360° Contributor

Who won the Palin-Biden debate? Barack Obama, I suspect.

Who was the big loser? In an historic fortnight that had already underscored his erratic nature, John McCain.

The fact that Palin was able to string her sentences together last night – which she couldn’t manage to do in her unscripted interviews with Katie Couric - shows only how low McCain has strapped his presidential quest.

Sarah Palin’s task was an impossible one: to demonstrate that she is ready to be president of the United States. McCain put her in that impossible position; and her performance — all prep and no depth — demonstrated the bind he has put himself in.

Yes, he “energized the base” with his Hail Mary pick of Palin as a running mate. But he also demonstrated cynical disregard for the requirement of stable governance were he to be elected president, and then - through his incapacitation or death - Palin be called upon to exercise the powers of the presidency.

Just how scary a notion that is went on full display last night: She appeared to lack any semblance of the requisite depth, knowledge, or sense of history we should expect in a president or vice president; then she sought to excuse it by saying, “I’ve only been at this for five weeks.”

Yes, she could wink, she could tell Biden, “Say it ain’t so, Joe, there you go again,” and she could remind us again and again that she is a hockey Mom from the land of Joe-Six-pack (as if Western Republicans don’t swill Pinot Grigio with the rest of the country at their fund-raisers). She seemed incapable of thinking through the American condition and responding to it except by scripted answers, theatrical gestures, and tested buzzwords — and by announcing at the outset that she would decide which questions from the moderator to answer and which to ignore.

Yet Biden’s performance (deeply knowledgeable, sensible, and generally responsive to the questions) was perhaps the best evidence that - considered non-ideologically, but rather on judgment and temperament — Obama may be ready to be president, and McCain — who ought to be ready — is not.

Time after time, Biden had to tell Palin what John McCain’s real record is - as instance after instance - she misrepresented it (or misunderstood the legislative process), repeated easy slogans and bromides and, for the most part perhaps, offended the intelligence of voters who are not already die-hard, ideological proponents of right-wing Republicanism, creationism, or simplistic solutions to tough problems.

“Maverick,” “Maverick,” “Maverick,” she kept repeating about John McCain and herself. Perhaps Biden’s best moment in the best night of his career as a candidate (and I have heard him at his awful worst — i.e., being his own worst enemy) came when he challenged McCain’s constant claim to the Maverick title.

The tactical and intellectual deficiencies of the McCain campaign have been best analyzed by conservative and Republican commentators, and even politicians. George Will, Charles Krauthammer, Peggy Noonan, Chuck Hagel, come quickly to mind. (Hence, Krauthammer, following last night’s debate: “You can't blame McCain. In an election in which all the fundamentals are working for the opposition, he feels he has to keep throwing long in order to keep hope alive. Nonetheless, his frenetic improvisation has perversely [for him] framed the rookie challenger favorably as calm, steady and cool.”)

As a former White House (Republican) chief of staff said to me, “Palin is evidence of desperation; she is an embarrassment.” That is the bottom line. (I generally check in with Republicans — not Democrats - to assess how the McCain campaign is doing.) He noted, “She wasn’t vetted, really; it’s an open secret in Washington, but the details of the negligence are better known to Republicans than Democrats.” That doesn’t mean she doesn’t have a future in the Republican galaxy, lacks star power, or couldn’t be a fine Secretary of the Interior in a McCain administration.

It’s too bad. Earlier in his career, until the presidency finally seemed within his grasp, McCain had demonstrated a real willingness to seriously and thoughtfully take on both his party and the Washington establishment when he thought they were wrong — albeit mostly on one issue: pork, an issue he has been heroic on.

But his real opportunity to show independence of his party’s reigning dogma and cultural-warrior-infantry was in his choice of a vice presidential running mate. Instead, McCain, who has lectured us about duty, honor, country first, has left many independent-minded voters who might want to vote for him at an impossible, dangerous impasse: an unprepared vice presidential candidate running on a ticket with the oldest presidential nominee in history — a 72-year-old with four cancer surgeries and medical records he has ordered sealed.

Conventional wisdom has almost always held (JFK-LBJ being a notable exception) that a presidential nominee’s choice of vice president makes no difference in the outcome of the election.

This time it is likely to be determinate, because it tells us so much not only about Sarah Palin, but also John McCain’s state of mind today, and the promise that his political career once held and now appears to have been left behind.

Carl Bernstein
AC360° Contributor

In one of our many conversations as we crisscrossed the country during his campaign for the 2000 Republican presidential nomination, John McCain said to me, "I've always tried to act on what I thought was the best for the country. And that has guided me.... The only thing I can do is assure people that I would act on principle."

I traveled with McCain for weeks that political season, stayed in Arkansas with him, Cindy, and their children, and – for a Vanity Fair cover profile - filled dozens of notebooks and tapes with observations from and about a potentially heroic politician who seems far removed from the man running for president today.

Three weeks after the 2008 Republican convention, on the cusp (maybe) of the first presidential debate, it is time to confront an awkward but profound question: whether in picking Sarah Palin as his running mate, John McCain has committed - by his own professed standards of duty and honor - a singularly unpatriotic act.

"I would rather lose a political campaign than lose a war," he has said throughout this campaign. Yet, in choosing Palin, he has demonstrated - whatever his words - it may be permissible to imperil the country, conceivably even to "lose" it, in order to win the presidency. That would seem the deeper meaning of his choice of Palin.

Indeed, no presidential nominee of either party in the last century has seemed so willing to endanger the country's security as McCain in his reckless choice of a running mate. He is 72 years old; has had four melanomas, a particularly voracious form of cancer; refuses to release his complete medical records.

Three of our last eleven presidents (and nine of all 43) have come to office unexpectedly in mid-term from the vice presidency: Truman, who within days of FDR's death was confronted with the decision of whether to drop the atom bomb on Japan; Lyndon Johnson, who took the oath in Dallas after JFK's assassination; Gerald Ford, sworn in following the resignation of Richard Nixon. A fourth vice president, George H.W. Bush, briefly exercised the powers of the presidency after the near-assassination of Ronald Reagan.

Given that history, what does John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin - the cavalier, last-minute process of her selection and careless vetting; and her over-briefed, fact-lite performance since - reveal about this military man who has attested to us for years that he is guided by his personal code of honor? "Two things I will never do," McCain told me, "are [to] lie to the American people, or put my electoral interests before the national interest" - an obvious precursor of "I would rather lose a political campaign than lose a war."

McCain, I wrote for Vanity Fair, "often speaks of the duty to follow his conscience in politics, rather than polls or party discipline. This, he says, comes from having escaped death and becoming 'more aware of the transience of everything we do.'"

"I've always had a pretty good idea about how to define something as to whether it's right or wrong," he told me. "I don't mean that I'm better or worse than anybody else. I just mean that when I see an issue and think about it and talk to people, I do generally have the ability to know what's the right course of action, even if it may not be what the majority wants. So I have a certain amount of confidence that I don't have to have a majority opinion on my side."

It does not take a near-death experience to know that Sarah Palin is not qualified to be commander in chief, or that - in choosing her - McCain has ignored his own oft-avowed code of conduct. "McCain made the most important command decision of his life when he chose Sarah Palin as his vice presidential nominee," noted David Ignatius in the Washington Post. "....No promotion board in history would have made such a decision."
--–

Above all, the John McCain I covered in 1999-2000 was - he said - convinced that two factors were undermining the interests of the United States: its cultural wars, causing political gridlock in Washington and civic discontent across the land; and the unbending agenda of the right-wing of the Republican party that, in his view, had been captured by the Christian conservative movement and bore disproportionate responsibility for the poisonous state of American politics. Exhibit One: the scorched-earth campaign that George W. Bush was then waging against McCain's insurgent run for the Republican presidential nomination.

Yet, McCain, is, in fact, running the kind of campaign against Barack Obama that George Bush ran against him in 2000, which he regarded rightly as dishonest, dishonorable and diversionary in terms of the truth about him and about the nation's problems.

The conservative commentator George Will has been especially incisive of late about the "dismaying," "un-presidential temperament" of McCain and the sleazy tenor of his campaign. Karl Rove (!) has responded to the incessant lying of McCain's ads (one claims falsely that Obama has promoted "comprehensive" sex education for five-year-olds - he had, in fact, endorsed legislation to insure that kindergartners were warned about sexual predators), by saying, yes, the McCain camp's mendacity has "gone one step too far."

Meanwhile, McCain's frequent invocations of the need for bi-partisan statesmanship are interspersed with the angry themes of cultural warfare and of the Republican convention orchestrated by his handlers, the most dominant of them practitioners from the campaigns of George W. Bush: attacks on "tax-and-spend Democrats," on the dependable liberal bogeyman, on "the angry Left," on Constitution-rewriting federal judges (including, incongruously, three of the Supreme Court justices who voted to uphold McCain's singular legislative achievement: the campaign-finance act he authored with Democrat Russ Feingold).

"If hypocrisy were gold, the Capitol would be Fort Knox," McCain once famously said. "Some of those guys," he said, referring to his fellow senators, "have they even had lives? What have they done?" He added, "Aw, jeez, this is exactly the kind of thing that gets me into trouble." Indeed.
McCain's first choices to be his running mate were former Gov. Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania and Senator Joe Lieberman, the Democrat-turned-Independent from Connecticut, and former vice presidential nominee of his former party. Neither passed the ideological litmus test of the Republican-Right - "The Base" - because each holds pro-choice views. Certainly both are qualified to step into the presidency in terms of national security credentials - regardless of whether one agrees with their particular politics - in the event of the death of the president.

McCain's "Hail Mary" pick - Palin - was hastily decided on the next-to-last day of the Democratic convention, by which time it was evident that Obama's convention was winning over independent voters; all that remained was the final night and the opportunity for Obama to deliver a speech that would further work to his advantage, and debilitate the McCain campaign. Only by exciting "The Base" could McCain remain competitive and win, it was calculated.

The distance from McCain's ads and assertions about his presidential opponent and Democrats generally, and his decision to run a "persona-based" campaign, as opposed to being specific on the issues, is of a piece with his choice of Palin to be his running mate. As another conservative commentator sometimes critical of McCain - Peggy Noonan - has noted, the "narrative" of a life [McCain's, Palin's], takes over from existential political fact in the type of campaign run by McCain and his handlers. We have heard an awful lot in the past few weeks, especially from Sarah Palin, about John McCain "The Maverick," just as we did in the convention narrative. But what McCain has actually been doing in this campaign, rather than actually being The Maverick, is conveying the appearance of iconoclasm, and playing to the crowd. (Hence, perhaps, "suspending" his campaign - and trying to postpone the first presidential debate while his poll numbers are sinking - to deal with the financial crisis?) At this point, the maverick claim seems no more genuine than Sarah Palin's charade foreign-policy tour of Manhattan with no witnesses - reporters - permitted to observe the proceedings.

The issue of Palin's relative ignorance about international affairs and the larger world beyond America's shores (compared to previous vice presidential nominees), her attendant arrogance in seeming to revel in it, and McCain's decision to subject the country to it in choosing a possible president - is the biggest question in this election, or perhaps ought to be. It goes to the core of who the John McCain of this campaign is.

Another conservative commentator, David Brooks, wrote last week: "Sarah Palin has many virtues. If you wanted someone to destroy a corrupt establishment, she'd be your woman. But the constructive act of governance is another matter. She has not been engaged in national issues, does not have a repertoire of historic patterns and, like President Bush, she seems to compensate for her lack of experience with brashness and excessive decisiveness."

The more we learn, the more we realize the vetting process was - given the rush of the circumstances - hopelessly inadequate: McCain didn't know many aspects of Palin's record or her reputation (none of which is to say she wouldn't be a congenial fit as, say, Secretary of Interior in a McCain administration). McCain's first choices for a running mate - Ridge and Lieberman - were light years ahead of Palin in the vice presidential-qualification department. But they didn't meet the ideological test, exactly the ideological litmus test that McCain has attacked his whole political career and told us he would never succumb to.

John McCain is a serious man, as anyone who has spent time with him knows. But he has not run the kind of serious campaign he once promised.

Not for the first time, as many of his fellow Republicans (as opposed to friendly reporters and sympathetic Democrats) had long maintained, McCain's more reckless inclinations and lesser impulses prevailed. A great political movement that would transcend rabid partisanship and hard ideology does not seem in the cards.

And if he wins the election, Sarah Palin - who in her first post-convention discussion of foreign policy indicated a willingness to go to war with Russia over Georgia - stands a heartbeat away from the presidency.

Ultimately it is the choice of Palin, made in the moment when action speaks loudest, that may undermine a quarter-century of assertions by John McCain about the preeminence of duty, honor and country in his political schema.

Editor's Note: This essay was written originally for The Huffington Post.

Carl Bernstein
AC360° Contributor

Barack Obama is getting the convention he wants, under extraordinarily difficult circumstances. The convention he is building reflects him and his priorities: it’s thoughtful, not just red-meat; and he’s in surprising control of the message, given the forces he’s dealing with. Indeed, the convention-building and the message may be far more sophisticated and effective than we instant commentators were prepared to discern. Witness the opening night grousing on-air about the convention’s supposed thematic absence, and aversion to instant butchery of the opposition.

Task Number One for Obama:
Defining himself as a person, not just a politician: telling his story and that of Michelle Obama and their family. An American story, meant to definitively undermine the oppo-narrative of the Clinton campaign, and now the Republican oppo-narrative – that he is some kind of vaguely alien, exotic candidate. (For some undecided voters, that also means uncomfortably black). Michelle Obama – as well as the team that produced her bio-pic – delivered with perfect pitch on Night One.

This was the real opening business of the convention, the essential themes to get right. As well as to establish an umbilical connection between Obama and the greatest of Democratic traditions and immutable principles… a generational passing of the torch that Caroline and Ted Kennedy declared unmistakably – and emotionally – had now moved past the Clintons.

It would be hard to underestimate how personally difficult the defection of the Kennedys has been for Hillary and Bill Clinton: consider how, as an adolescent, Bill idolized JFK, emulated him as a politician; that JFK Jr. was among the first contributors to Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign; and that Caroline’s mother, Jacqueline Kennedy, formed a close friendship with Hillary (in private, they shared a wicked sense of humor), and told friends that, of all her successors as First Lady, she was most fond of Hillary Clinton. Caroline and Ted Kennedy’s endorsement of Obama on January 28 was a critical blow to Hillary’s campaign).

Task Number Two:
Defining Obama’s Politics: Anyone who has talked to Obama knows he genuinely believes in ending the cultural wars that have poisoned the politics of past generation; and, whether you agree with his solutions or not, he has given great thought to the condition and state of America—its problems, its strengths, and how to initiate a tectonic (and generational) change in political direction. What he has not done, say even many of his allies, is get very specific during the campaign about programs, numbers, legislation. (See Task 4.)

Mark Warner’s keynote speech was on a plane not usually in evidence at conventions: subtle, powerful, inspirational, cerebral, practical – and as convincing a case as can be made for the underpinnings of Obama’s politics and a post-Bush, post-Clinton, post-partisan agenda. He made the connection between the man and his politics. Substantively, there were reminders of how thoughtful, humane, and forward-looking Bill Clinton’s politics looked some 15 years ago.

Task Number Three, a Houdiniesque Proposition:
Easing the Clintons off center stage (inevitably, still kicking) and into the kind of major supporting roles in the Obama campaign that capture all the unique Clintonian star power, and even compels Hillary and Bill Clinton to help Barack Obama win the presidency.

This Houdiniesque proposition recognizes that the Clintons, campaigning for Obama in the right places, and pushing the right political and media buttons, can deliver as no other Democrats in America. And that it is in their interests to do so, thus rescuing Bill Clinton’s damaged legacy from a brutal primary season’s beating (and his own self-destructive instincts); and even further enhancing Hillary’s stature as a leader in the party and the nation — without further threatening Obama.

Hillary’s speech last night was the crucial first step: a huge stride toward uniting her genuine movement of women and blue-collar workers with Obama’s formidable new Democratic movement that almost couldn’t close the deal by the end of the primary-caucus season. If she and Obama can fuse those two movements in Denver without a divisive struggle on the convention floor (as seems likely), Obama is a lot closer to being able to win the presidency than he was a week ago. And already, Hillary has delivered for him, big-time – despite some carping that she didn’t go far enough.

Now, look for both Clintons to begin campaigning in critical battleground states as early next week. And for Bill Clinton to deliver a powerful speech on Obama’s behalf tonight, throwing the hall into predictably pandemonious excess (as did Hillary), leaving no doubt among Democrats of all persuasions that John McCain and Bush-Republican policies are a totally unacceptable alternative to Barack Obama.

A footnote to the ongoing Clintonian psychodrama that, as usual and quite reasonably, has mesmerized the media and continues to hang over the political landscape in Denver and beyond:

First, the essential dynamic: that the Clintons do not like Obama, hate how he systematically went about burying their attempt at a Clintonian restoration to the presidency; and they have never found it easy to be gracious in defeat. The final, gratuitously vicious wound (in their view) was Obama’s decision not to make Hillary his vice presidential nominee.

Fact: Once the “Atlantic Monthly Memos” were published — with Mark Penn’s overt strategy of smearing Barack Obama as coming from an “unAmerican” background — there was virtually no chance Hillary would have been acceptable to Obama or his wife. The only possibility, say his aides: if it were indelibly clear that he could not win the presidency without putting her on the ticket.

Obama and his small cadre of top aides were convinced there is a far better way, without the oxygen-consuming formula of Hillary-as-Veep now on display at the convention: Put the Clintons to work for the Obama-Biden ticket, getting them to fly the Democratic flag against John McCain, and — based on Obama’s real respect for them both and their singular accomplishments – giving them outsized roles in national life during an Obama administration.

Meanwhile, the Clintons — as if to underscore the personal (as differentiated from simply political) chasm between Obama and themselves — let it be known that Mark Penn had a hand in drafting both their convention speeches.

Task Number Four:
Delivering — beyond the Obama aura and the oratory — with specifics: His speech on the last night of the convention. It is instructive to watch Obama’s remarkable speech to the 2004 Democratic convention: he must do it one better in 2008, laying out a vision for the country under his leadership that is specific enough (his top aides seem to agree) to put an end to the Clinton-McCain refrain that he’s all about oratory.

He — and others, including Joe Biden tonight — will be addressing the supposed commander-in-chief gap and the “3 a.m.” assertions that he’s not ready to lead. Look for a passel of generals to be on-stage with Obama in the stadium tomorrow night.

——–

Obama beat the toughest Democratic machine of modern times, and a candidate considered by the media, the pollsters and most of the political class to be the Democrats’ inevitable nominee. He did it by staying on message; out-organizing the Clinton campaign in state after state; harnessing the power of a new generation of voters; and utilizing a set of tools (particularly the Internet) that his opponents vastly underestimated.

The most consistent aspect of the Obama campaign from the beginning has been its discipline, and the nominee’s control of his own message and apparat. Thus far, the Denver convention seems to be on that same track.

Inside Denver's Pepsi Center, host to the 2008 Democratic National Convention.

Carl Bernstein
AC360° Contributor

A few observations as the convention is about to convene:

This is Barack Obama's convention. It will have his stamp on it, including ushering the Clintons off center-stage and into supporting roles-however reluctantly.

It is also a Democratic Party convention, with threads of history and some immutable principles since the 1960s-especially regarding civil rights, women's rights, and a certain perspective on economic issues. The Clintons are (whatever their shortcomings) a big part of that story, especially the successful parts: Bill Clinton is the only Democrat to be
elected twice to the presidency since FDR.

The Clintons-like Ted Kennedy, who will be powerfully present tonight-do not want to see the presidency turned over to John McCain or four more years of Republican policies: remember, they have spent their adult lives fighting against the Republican Right....even to the extent of Hillary Clinton labeling it "the vast right-wing conspiracy."

We journalists, especially on television in the past few days, have placed far too much emphasis on recent polls, a notable example being trying to divine the effect of Joe Biden's addition to the ticket within hours of his being named. This is silly.

The presidency will be won in the electoral college, something very different than national polls about the popular vote. Polls can be good snapshots, useful tools-but, as Mark Penn and Hillary Clinton learned, they can be far off-course.

Barack Obama confounded almost every poll to defeat Hillary Clinton-and concentrated on superior organization, the consistency of his message (sometimes perhaps vague in terms of what he would specifically do as president), and remarkable discipline. Most Republican professionals I have talked to believe he has a large organizational advantage in the states he must win to become president.

Bill Clinton-not Hillary-has been the big loser in this election thus far; his legacy was tarnished by his conduct during the campaign, and he knows he must give a great speech for Barack Obama at this convention to regain much of the respect he lost even among Democrats who had all but worshipped him.

Hillary Clinton's acolytes—with a certain percentage excepted—are unlikely to move in droves to a McCain-Republican, pro-life conservative message, no matter how disaffected they might feel as a result of the bruising primaries and caucuses.

Barack Obama’s principal campaign aides are, in private, forthright in their recognition that their candidate—and Michelle Obama—must raise their “comfort level” with many American voters. The convention, they say, from beginning to end, is intended to do just that, culminating in Obama’s last-evening acceptance speech, in which he will (they say) be more specific than in the past about his plans for the presidency.

Race is a big part of this story, and perhaps the biggest unknown factor. We who are covering the campaign shouldn’t shy away from the subject, even if the two candidates (at least in their words) stay away from it.

Perhaps we reporters need to let this convention happen in real time, with a little less speculation on our part, and more reporting. That doesn't mean we shouldn't be analyzing and challenging and interpreting even doing some informed speculation. But there is going to be a hell of a story unfolding before our eyes this week, and we oughtn't divert our eyes and ears too much from it, and in the process focus on a heap of ephemera.

Program Note: In the next installment of CNN's Black in America series, Soledad O'Brien examines the successes, struggles and complex issues faced by black men, women and families, 40 years after the death of the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Watch encore presentation Saturday & Sunday, 8 p.m. ET

We devote several days on the blog to smart insight and commentary related to the special.
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Editor’s Note: In 1989, Carl Bernstein published a memoir about growing up in a segregated, McCarthy-era Washington, titled Loyalties: A Son’s Memoir. Part of the book focuses on Washingtonians –including Bernstein’s parents and their black and white friends – who worked to desegregate public places in the nation’s capital. It was a Jim Crow town, including its restaurants, hotels, and the segregated schools that Carl attended until he was in the sixth grade, when the Supreme Court struck down segregation of public education– in the case of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. It is a little remembered fact that the companion case to Brown was Bolling v. Sharpe, in which the justices held unanimously that “Racial segregation in the public schools of the District of Columbia is a denial to Negro children of the due process of law guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment.”

The following excerpt from Loyalties describes the demonstrations Bernstein participated in—as a child–in 1951 and 1952.

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Carl Bernstein
CNN Political Analyst

My most pervasive memory of those two summers is of the heat. That oppressive Washington heat. This was before air-conditioning, or at least before anyone I knew had air-conditioning at home, 1951, ’52. In her history of black Washington, The Secret City, Constance McLaughlin Green devotes a few lines to what happened those summers, but she doesn’t mention the heat.

…The campaign [to desegregate] downtown restaurants began after the report of the National Committee on Segregation drew attention to the lost anti-discrimination laws of 1872 and 1873…Members of the Citizens Committee for Enforcement assembled statistics on how many out of 99 restaurants in downtown Washington denied service to well-behaved colored or racially mixed groups, how many accepted them, and in either case what the proprietors’ reasons were and how white patrons reacted. Under the guidance of Annie Stein, an energetic young white woman, and further inspired by the nonagenarian Mary Church Terrell, the surveying groups, each composed of three or four people, were at pains never to argue with waitresses or managers and left quietly if they were rebuffed.

Actually it was only at the beginning of the campaign that we left quietly when we were rebuffed. “Negotiate, boycott, picket.” That was the strategy Annie Stein had devised. I hated the whole enterprise. I was seven years old. Thursdays and Saturdays I’d be ripped from the neighborhood, torn from the day’s game of stepball or running bases, and placed on a streetcar that took me and my mother to the little law office that Joe Forer and Dave Rein shared downtown across from the Trans-Lux Theatre on Fourteenth Street. There Annie Stein would tap me on the head and say, “Now, honey, this is so-and-so,” and pair me with a Negro child. The black children usually wore church clothes, little girls in pink and white and lace and patent leather, boys with too-long clip-on neckties hanging from starched collars, jackets neatly buttoned.

Today, it is difficult to convey—much less comprehend—that slow, drawled, hazy small-town atmosphere of mid-century Washington. I went to a segregated public school; all the city’s playgrounds and swimming pools were segregated; the hotels were for whites only, except for the Dunbar, way up on Fifteenth Street across the city’s old Boundary Avenue; the wards of the municipal hospitals were segregated; the only integrated theater in town was the Gayety Burlesque house on Ninth street.

There had always been Negroes in and out of our house, and from the outset I had been taught that for them life was defined by struggle and filled with injustice. The Negroes I knew best were the Richardson family. Tommy Richardson was vice president of my father’s union; his father, whom I knew only as Mr. Richardson, was a redcap at Union Station and a member of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters.

Sundays, usually after visiting the Richardsons, I would be hauled off to the Young People’s Jewish Center of Washington, a secular alternative to religious study, where a few hours of discussion about the Israelites, W.E.B Du Bois and Abraham Lincoln did little to clarify the prevailing order of things. We studied the report of the President’s Committee on Segregation in the Nation’s Capital, a thin blue volume with a picture on the cover of the Great Emancipator sitting in his temple at the end of Memorial Bridge. Agonizing in its detail, the report enumerated the indignities and cruelties of Negro life in Washington.

By then people in Washington were becoming aroused by the demonstrations downtown. One Sunday, my sisters and I were packed in the dilapidated family Plymouth for another rally that Annie Stein had organized in the field behind Trenton Terrace, in Southeast D.C. But this time it was more than just my father’s union and the same familiar faces. A movement was building. A lot of white people there had read in the newspapers about what was happening downtown. People came from the Government Cafeteria Workers Union, the Sleeping Car Porters, the Hotel and Restaurant Workers, the black churches and, according to the FBI files on my mother and father (which I obtained a generation later under the Freedom of Information Act), the Progressive Party; my father was chairman of its antidiscrimination committee, Annie was secretary—facts noted in the FBI reports. It is my recollection that Paul Robeson sang at the picnic, but that isn’t reflected in the files. Pete Seeger’s presence is noted, however. I remember he sang “Which Side Are You On,” and (before everybody joined hands for “Solidarity Forever”) he introduced a version of Leadbelly’s “Washington’s a Bourgeois Town,” with the words changed to “Washington’s a Jim Crow Town.”

--–

The only places downtown where Negroes knew they could sit down to eat were the railroad station and the government cafeterias; even there, my father says, the union—his union, the government workers’ union, of which he was director of negotiations– was constantly challenging food-service managers who took it upon themselves to designate separate seating areas for blacks.

Except for the government buildings, there were few places where colored people were permitted to go to the bathroom. Usually, when one of the black children in the “sit-downs”—which is what we called the demonstrations of those summers—had to go to the bathroom, we would go running to the National Gallery of Art, which was about five blocks away. But more often that not it would be too late by the time we got there, and the children would cry, and sometimes their mothers and even their fathers would, too. Years later, when I was a reporter covering civil rights marches in the South, I couldn’t get out of my head a picture of those little children holding their legs together and the pain the their faces. I think one of the reasons I hated going downtown those Saturdays and Thursdays, the big shopping days, was the knowledge that my friends were going to pee in their pants. There seemed to me two cruelties: the indignity of segregation, and the shame our demonstrations inflicted on my friends.

Once, before marching into the streets, Mary Church Terrell, a bent woman with a cane and white hair and a whispery voice, came to talk to the children about what we were doing. When she was a girl, right after the Civil war, she told us, she had been allowed to eat in the restaurants downtown. But that was eighty years earlier, during Reconstruction; it was the last time. If others were to join our cause, we had to be sturdy and be models of decorum—and here she looked at the Negro children—lest we “disgrace the race.” Those were actually words, my mother remembers them, too. It seemed to me she was asking an awful lot.
I have only vague recollections of encountering hostility from white patrons and restaurant workers and downtown shoppers who watched us those summers; occasionally someone would spit or call us nigger lovers. Much more the impression is of curiosity, especially in the earliest days.

Leaving the little law office of Forer and Rein, we would go usually in groups of four or five, black and white. While the grownups talked to the hostess or manager—a process that could take considerable time while matters of law, the Constitution, and custom were quietly discussed—we held each other’s hands, aware of the stares and the attention. A couple of times photographers from the newspapers, with big square cameras and popping flashbulbs, took our picture. I worried about what my friends in the neighborhood would think if they knew what I was doing. It was one thing to say I didn’t believe it was right when they used the word “nigger”; but this was something else again.

A lot of times the restaurant managers announced that they felt sad about not being able to serve us, but that it would be bad for business; some said they would welcome a decision in the courts requiring all restaurants to serve everybody. A few times we were taken to tables and seated. Usually not. That was in the restaurants—“lunchrooms,” as the local terminology had it. But the real focus of the campaign became the lunch counters, in the dime stores on F Street and in the big department stores. By the end of the first summer there were often more than a hundred of us testing and picketing and sitting down every Thursday and Sunday. My mother kept long lists of names, and on the days when we didn’t go downtown she’d be on the phone, lining people up.

“Everybody brought their children,” she remembers. “God, it was hot as hell.”

The dime stores had huge double doors on both sides of their display windows and, just inside, big rotating floor fans. Entering, I would try to delay the proceedings by lingering insdie the doorway, savoring the breeze. The lunch counters extended from the front of each store to the back—first the stand-up portion near the entrance, then a long row of swivel seats that stretched to the back. The seats were for whites only. We would walk inside, six or eight or ten to a group, black and white, choosing a moment when there were empty seats because, Annie Stein had said, that meant if we weren’t served we would be hurting business by continuing to occupy them. I liked swiveling in the seats. They were made of wood with chrome on the back, the kind that gave a little when you leaned back. The women behind the counter wore hairnets and were very polite, even though they said they could not serve us. No matter how many times we sat down there was always present the element of astonishment, not so much from the whites as from the Negroes who would be standing in the front, packed three and four deep while they ate. They stopped. Put down their hot dogs. Stared. Nobody had ever done this before. The only downtown lunch counter where Negroes had sat in this century was at Union Station. It was said that while the station was being built Teddy Roosevelt heard it was to have separate waiting rooms and a Jim Crow restaurant. Furious, he sent orders to the project managers from the White House saying if the station wasn’t built with facilities to be shared by blacks and whites there would be no station. Every since, the concessionaries had honored TR’s dictum.

But nowhere else. Once, on a picket line at Kresge’s, Annie Stein handed me a sign to carry: “Is it right/If you’re not white/You can’t sit down/To eat a bite.” My black friend, Tommy Richardson’s son Earl, was given a sign saying: “Its our Ambition/To Eat at Kresge’s/In a Sitting Position.”

-----

A follow up by Bernstein, from today:

Eventually, we won—in the Supreme Court, a year before Brown v. Board of Education. Forer and Rein argued the case, and the Justices held that the District of Colombia’s 1872-1873 laws outlawing segregation in public places, specifically including restaurants, soda fountains, barber shops, and hotels, were still valid, though they had been dropped form the city code in 1901 to re-institute segregation in the nation’s capital.

Senators Clinton and Obama at the NAACP annual convention in July, 2006.

Carl Bernstein
CNN Political Analyst and author of "A Woman In Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton"

 
Senator Hillary Clinton personally assured Barack Obama today that she recognizes he has won the Democratic nomination for president, and that “I’m prepared to help in any way I can,” according to a person familiar with their conversation.
 
Though she would prefer to be on his ticket as the vice presidential nominee, said this person, Senator Clinton has said her  only requirement  as the campaign goes forward is that “she be a player in the whole process. She doesn’t necessarily want to leave the Senate,  but she does want to be sure that key people from her campaign will have a role in Obama’s  presidential campaign and—if he wins the presidency—his administration.”

“Yes, it is somewhat a power play for vice president,” said this person, a Clinton supporter in Washington with whom she sometimes counsels on important matters.  “But being on the ticket is  not a requirement” for her unqualified help, especially in convincing her supporters to embrace Obama’s candidacy.   “Her speech [Tuesday night] was about being a player and making sure she was a player.”  

However, as late as three this morning, said a source in touch with the highest levels of her campaign, Senator Clinton still believed it remained remotely possible she might become the eventual nomineee of the party, and was determined not to concede to Obama imminently.  Her thinking, said this source, remained focused on the idea that some piece of negative information about Obama might surface, or that some of the superdelegates might be somehow swayed after reconsidering that she was the more electable candidate, after some days of reflection  and polling.

“It’s crazy. Her head is not there yet, to the point where she is willing to accept that she’s not going to be the nominee,” said one of her major supporters this morning, based on knowledge of conversations Tuesday night between Senator Clinton and her seniormost advisors.

Apparently one of the things that changed her mind was the obviously negative reaction of some of her most important backers—-including members of Congress–to her failure to acknowledge Obama as the nominee in her speech to supporters, after Obama had definitively secured the number of delegates necessary to be the nominee.

As the critical response, especially from supporters who had never before wavered, threatened to reach a crescendo-—and it became evident that her chances of becoming the vice presiential nominee were being adversely affected by the reaction—-she went out of her way to assure Obama personally that she recognized his victory, would give him her complete support,  and  try to bring along  her own acolytes skeptical of his candidacy, and would do so rapidly.

Her effusive praise of Obama before the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee today was partly intended to assure him of the kind of support she  intends to put forward—and demonstrate credibility with certain constitutencies she hopes will lead Obama to choose her as his running mate.

“I think she’ll be a total activist. Within a very short period of time you’ll see a very united deal,” said a member of her senior-support network.   Apparently, that will occur Saturday, according to a statement from the Clinton campaign.

Meanwhile, her representatives have begun talking with senior Obama advisors about ways that he can help her pay off more than $10 million in campaign debt, through his partcipation in fund-raising efforts on her behalf between now and September, according to a knowledgeable source.  September is the legal deadline for retiring certain forms of campaign debt under Federal law.

In terms of her vice-presidential aspirations, which Bill Clinton has been pushing privatey as an alternative if she failed in her bid for the presidency,  Senator Clinton is said by her closest supporters to be genuinely convinced that Obama will have a very difficult time winning the presidency without her on the ticket, and that she is intent on demonsrating over the coming weeks her indispensibility to his cause.

“He (Obama) has a real problem with the Jewish vote, with white women over fifty, and a Catholic problem,” said one of Senator Clinton’s backers. “She can do a lot for him with those groups.”
   
It will be a very difficult sell, according to Obama’s senior advisors, many of whom have come to despise—the word is not too strong–the Clintons with the same degree of contempt that the Clintons have, in private and not-so-private, exhibited toward Obama.   

However, Senator Obama is said by some of these same senior advisors not to be nearly so disdainful of Senator Clinton as some on his staff, but he has  been deeply angered at the conduct of aspects of her campaign and the words of both Bill and Hillary Clinton.

With dwindling chances of winning the Democratic nomination for president, close friends and supporters of Senator Clinton are looking for a “graceful exit strategy” from the race. One option is a joint ticket, with Clinton as the vice presidential nominee.

Two weeks ago, Carl Bernstein anticipated this very discussion. You can read Carl’s analysis here.
And you can read Suzanne Malveaux’s report on the exit strategies being discussed here.

Carl Bernstein writes that Hillary Clinton's campaign recognizes that it faces an uphill battle.

Carl Bernstein
360° Contributor

Friends and close associates of both Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are now convinced that, assuming she loses the race for the presidential nomination, she is probably going to fight to be the vice presidential nominee on an Obama-for-president ticket.

Clinton "is trying to figure out how to land the plane without looking like surrender," a prominent figure in the Obama camp said Friday. This means, in all likelihood, bringing her campaign to a close in the next few weeks and trying to leverage her way onto an Obama ticket from a position of maximum strength, said several knowledgeable sources.

A person close to her, with whom her campaign staff has counseled at various points, said this week, "I think the following will happen: Obama will be in a position where the party declares him the nominee by the first week in June. She'll still be fighting with everybody - the Rules Committee, the party leaders - and arguing, 'I'm winning these key states; I've got almost half the delegates. I have a whole constituency he hasn't reached. I've got real differences on approach to how we win this election, and I'm going to press the hell out of this guy. ... Relief for the middle class, universal health care, etc.; I'm Ms. Blue Collar, and I'm going to press my fight, because he can't win without my being on the ticket.' "

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Hillary Clinton has many admirable qualities, but candor and openness and transparency and a commitment to well-established fact have not been notable among them.  The indisputable elements of  her Bosnian adventure affirm (again) the reluctant conclusion I reached in the final chapter of A Woman In Charge, my biography of her published last June:   

“Since her Arkansas years [I wrote], Hillary Rodham Clinton has always had a difficult relationship with the truth... [J]udged against the facts, she has often chosen to obfuscate, omit, and avoid.  It is an understatement by now that she has been known to apprehend truths about herself and the events of her life that others do not exactly share. " [italics added] 

As I noted: 

“Almost always, something holds her back from telling the whole story, as if she doesn’t trust the reader, listener, friend, interviewer, constituent—or perhaps herself—to understand the true significance of events…”

The Bosnian episode is a watershed event, because it indelibly brings to mind so many examples of this tendency– from the White House years and, worse, from Hillary Clinton’s take-no-prisoners presidential campaign. Her record as a public person is replete with “misstatements” and elisions and retracted and redacted and revoked assertions...     

When the facts surrounding such characteristic episodes finally get sorted out - usually long after they have been challenged - the  mysteries and contradictions are often dealt with by Hillary Clinton and her apparat in a blizzard of footnotes, addenda, revision, and disingenuous re-explanation: as occurred in regard to the draconian secrecy she imposed on her health-care task force (and its failed efforts in 1993-94); explanations of what could have been dutifully acknowledged, and deserved to be dismissed as a minor conflict of interest - once and for all - in Whitewater; or her recent Michigan-Florida migration from acceptance of the DNC’s refusal to recognize those states’ convention delegations (when it looked like she had the nomination sewn up) to her re-evaluation of  the matter as a grave denial of basic human rights, after she fell impossibly behind in the delegate count.The latest episode - the sniper fire she so vividly remembered and described in chilling detail to buttress her claims of  foreign policy “experience” - like the peace she didn’t bring to Northern Ireland, recalls another famous instance of faulty recollection during a crucial period in her odyssey.On January 15, 1995, she had just published her book, It Takes a Village, intended to herald a redemptive “come back” after the ravages of health care; Whitewater; the Travel Office firings she had ordered (but denied ordering); the disastrous staffing of the White House by the First Lady, not the President - all among   the egregious errors  that had led  to the election of the Newt Gingrich Congress in 1994.On her book tour, she was asked on National Public Radio about the re-emergence of dormant Whitewater questions that week, when the so-called “missing billing records” had been found. Hillary stated with unequivocal certainty that she had consistently made public all the relevant documents related to Whitewater, including “every document we had,” to the editors of the New York Times before the newspaper’s original Whitewater story ran during Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign.    

Even her closest aides - as in the case of the Bosnian episode18 years later - could not imagine what possessed her to say such a thing.  It was simply not true, as her lawyers and the editors of the Times (like CBS in the latest instance) recognized, leading to huge stories about her latest twisting of the facts. “Oh my God, we didn’t,” said Susan Thomasas, Hillary’s great friend, who was left to explain to the White House lawyers exactly how Hillary’s aides had carefully cherry-picked documents accessed for the Times in the presidential campaign.  The White House was forced - once again - to acknowledge the first lady had been ‘mistaken;” her book tour was overwhelmed by the matter, and Times’ columnist  Bill Safire that month coined the memorable characterization of Hillary Clinton as “a congenital liar.”

“Hillary values context; she does see the big picture. Hers, in fact, is not the mind of a conventional politician,”  I wrote in A Woman In Charge. “But when it comes to herself, she sees with something less than candor and lucidity. She sees, like so many others, what she wants to see.”

The book concludes with this paragraph:

“As Hillary has continued to speak from the protective shell of her own making, and packaged herself for the widest possible consumption, she has misrepresented not just facts but often her essential self.  Great politicians have always been marked by the consistency of their core beliefs, their strength of character in advocacy, and the self-knowledge that informs bold leadership. Almost always, Hillary has stood for good things. Yet there is a disconnect between her convictions and her words and actions. This is where Hillary disappoints. But the jury remains out. She still has time to prove her case, to effectuate those things that make her special, not fear them or camouflage them. We would all be the better for it, because what lies within may have the potential to change the world, if only a little.”

The jury - armed with definitive evidence like the CBS tape of  Hillary Clinton’s Bosnian adventure - seems on the verge of returning a negative verdict on her candidacy.   

- Carl Bernstein, 360° Contributor Editor's note: Read other blogs from the 360° team of contributors at cnn.com/360

The calculated decision that Bill Clinton will lead his wife's attack on Barack Obama - here and now, and increasingly leading up to the February 5 Super Tuesday primaries - represents a shift in the fundamental Democratic campaign dynamic, which is unnerving influential Democrats, both in her camp and Obama's.

They fear that the campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination has thus taken on an ugly aspect that is already spinning out of control, and could damage the party's chances in November; strip the former President of his unique position as the Democrats' most popular and influential figure; and - worst of all - focus attention not on electing Sen. Hillary Clinton as president, but rather, the less palatable question of the Clintons' - plural - restoration to the White House.

The whole question of Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, and their difficult relationship to the truth is now front and center. Or, as one of the Clintons' suppoters put it to me, "The circus is back. Many Democrats may love Bill Clinton - and they do - but not many relish the prospect of the circus back on center-stage" in American life.

However, the Clintons believe this course - with Bill Clinton leading a careful but unrelenting attack on Obama's credibility and credentials - may be the only way to reduce the chances that Hillary Clinton could get grievously injured in the February 5 Super Tuesday primaries and lose the nomination to Obama.

– CNN Contributor Carl BernsteinEditor's note: Carl Bernstein discusses his views with Anderson on tonight's 360 at 10p ET.