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Subject: Quests and Pressure in America's Shadow Capital;With Clinton in Seclusion,
Date: Sun, 15 Nov 92 08:24:29 EST
Message-ID: <18.1992Nov15.082429@AmeriCast.com>

Quests and Pressure in America's Shadow Capital;With Clinton in
Seclusion, Only a Few People Know a Lot - and Information Is
Power<By David Maraniss=Washington Post Staff Writer=

LITTLE ROCK, Ark., Nov. 14 - One recent night in this place that
a local weekly paper sardonically calls the New Camelot, Dee Dee
Myers, press secretary to President-elect Clinton, received a
phone call from a wire service reporter asking if Clinton's first
post-election news conference scheduled for the next day would
follow presidential format.

"Presidential format?" asked Myers. Informed that presidential
format included the tradition that a wire reporter asks the first
question at a White House news conference, Myers smiled and shook
her head.  If there is any sort of presidential format to what is
transpiring these days in America's shadow capital along the Ar-
kansas River, no one seems to know what it is. No one, perhaps,
except the next president, who has spent most of his time seclud-
ed behind the heavily protected iron gates of the red-brick
governor's mansion that he seems in no hurry to relinquish.

Transitions, by definition, are exercises in chaos and intrigue
where a few people know a whole lot and everyone else is left to
flail around in the whirlwind of rumor, speculation and ig-
norance.

They say that Washington has the highest number of psychiatrists
per capita, but the shrinks would be wise to set up branch of-
fices in Little Rock for the next month or so. The pressure to
get the scoop on who will be Clinton's chief of staff or commerce
secretary has turned many in the president-elect's already ex-
hausted reporter posse into borderline basket cases who scramble
around town with sky pagers vibrating and beeping at their waists
and cellular phones attached to their ears.

Life on the other side of the adversarial line is no better. Hun-
dreds of emotionally drained Clinton campaign aides are jockeying
for position in the transition and worrying whether their status
here will be duplicated when their boss makes his triumphant
march to Washington in January.

Information is power in the "Rock" these days, just as in Wash-
ington, and the key to obtaining information is the telephone.
That explains why Friday was meltdown day here. The Clinton peo-
ple moved from their campaign headquarters in the old Arkansas
Gazette newspaper building to transition digs on the fourth and
fifth floors of a sterile office building. All the phone numbers
were changed and nobody knew how to reach anybody else - the ul-
timate power outage.

For anyone unfamiliar with the city in which Bill Clinton lives,
perhaps a geopolitical travel guide would be in order. Little
Rock has 180,000 residents and 500 or so Clintonian transients -
in politics and journalism - who fight for rooms in the two
favored downtown hotels, the Capital and the Excelsior. There is
also, by the way, a downtown hotel serendipitously named the
Camelot, but it is rather far down the list of "in" spots.

The Capital Hotel is one of the three power places in town. At
sundown its dark and smoky bar fills with Clinton aides, journal-
ists and hangers-on who trade scuttlebutt deep into the night.
When Vice President-elect Gore is in town, he stays in a suite on
the third floor.  Five blocks up Louisiana Avenue from the hotel
is the Atkins Building, new home of the transition offices. It is
a 1980s-style nondescript building with a visitor-unfriendly at-
mosphere evoking something between the CIA and a medium security
prison. Journalists are forbidden to enter the fourth and fifth
floors, where the transition plans are being plotted.

What was a paid staff of about 350 during the height of the cam-
paign is down to about 70 in Little Rock. The major employment
center now for Clintonians is Washington, where about 80 percent
of the transition staff will operate and where the job re'sume's,
flooding in at the rate of 2,000 a day, will be perused.

But the real power will remain in Little Rock as long as Clinton
and his wife, Hillary, are here. Clinton's successor as governor,
Lt. Gov. Jim Guy Tucker, has dropped several hints that - to bor-
row a phrase from Gore - "it's time for them to go." But the
Clintons might stay at the mansion at least through Christmas. It
has been Clinton's home for 12 of the last 14 years, the only
home he has, and he is comfortable there.

The mansion, too, has been off-limits to journalists since the
election. Secret Service agents have barricaded the street ap-
proaching the driveway. Network camera crews and still photogra-
phers, fearful of missing any shot of the president-elect, stake
out the mansion from 6:15 every morning to 10 at night. They have
had slim pickings so far. Friday and today were described as
"down days," which meant that Clinton had no planned public ap-
pearances. A Clinton trip to the hospital, where he visited Sen.
David Pryor (D-Ark.), recovering from heart surgery, was treated
as a major news event.

To handle the overload of telephone calls coming in to the man-
sion, operators are working there on four shifts, 24 hours each
day, a fitting symbol for Clinton, who was once described by an
aide as "the human switchboard."

Dealing with the mail is an even more difficult matter. The flow
increased so much this week that the post office stopped sorting
out what should go to the mansion, the transition office or the
state capitol and sent it all to the correspondence center at the
Gazette building. This frustrated Hillary Clinton, who wanted to
see the family's personal mail and directed the 20-member
correspondence staff to sort it out and get it to her by noon
Friday.

Fat chance. When a family suddenly has 39,000 personal friends
writing each day, it is not easy figuring out who are the real
thing and who are fair-weather fans. But then again, learning to
tell the difference might be what this transitional phase is
about in the New Camelot.<02:17 11-15C9999-----

Copyright 1992, The Washington Post.  This story is from the
Washington Post's Capitol Edition On-Line and is not to be ar-
chived or redistributed.

For more information, send-email to American Cybercasting Cor-
poration (usa@AmeriCast.COM)