The Team Behind Bill & Hillary

By WALTER SHAPIRO LA CROSSE

For Bill Clinton and Al Gore, Iowa last week became their own Field of Dreams. A shimmering summer's day was just beginning its slow fade into dusk as the eight-bus caravan pulled into Manchester for a carefully orchestrated "unscheduled" stop. The local Democrats had done their part -- a crowd of nearly 1,000 had been waiting for several hours to gambol in the limelight. Gore, fast becoming the Ed McMahon of political warm-up acts, gave his patter- perfect introduction, complete with the mawkish reminder that Clinton's father died three months before Clinton was born. Then Clinton clambered up onto the small outdoor podium for a quick rendition of his stump speech. Knowing all too well how easily this political magic can fade, he tried to inoculate himself by warning, "In the next 88 days, those Republicans will try to scare you to death. Clinton and Gore -- those young fellows -- will go hog wild, and things will be terrible. For the only way those Republicans can be elected is to scare you to death."

Afterward, Clinton worked his way down the rope line, waving, shaking, touching, posing, always smiling, his blue dress shirt damp with perspiration, the Secret Service agents clinging to his belt when he leaned far into the crowd. The faces of Manchester conveyed the Music Man message that "there's nothing halfway about the Iowa way to greet you." The mood was warm and enveloping as Clinton heard each message of encouragement. "We owe it all to you." "You're doing great." "You'll be a great President."

None of this, of course, is conclusive. Friendly crowds and sunny poll numbers can be a fatal August illusion. But for now, the mood of the Clinton campaign is a kind of dazed humility at the wondrous workings of fate. Says campaign manager David Wilhelm, who originally dreamed up the notion of putting the Clinton campaign on wheels: "I'd love to be able to say that we knew it would strike this chord. It just isn't true."

, Hard to remember that at the end of the California primary in early June, the Clinton campaign was impelled forward by little more than a grim sense of inevitability. Clinton was physically drained from the gauntlet of primaries; the candidate's message of change had been pre-empted by Ross Perot; and the campaign structure in Little Rock had so many fancy titles and overlapping responsibilities that decisions had to be made by consensus -- or not at all.

Against this backdrop of drift and looming defeat, Clinton, prodded by his wife Hillary, belatedly realized that the campaign structure in Little Rock had to be revamped for the general election. It had become too much a mirror of Clinton's own personality, particularly his tendency to skirt conflict, paper over differences and thus tolerate confusion. "He's got good political instincts, but the problem is that he's so facile and adroit that people come away thinking they've heard what they want to hear," says a senior campaign adviser. Hillary does not have this problem. "She's quicker to clarify and make decisions than Bill," says Carolyn Staley, a longtime friend of the candidate's.

While the public relations effort to mold Hillary into a traditional my- heart-belongs-to-hubby First Lady means that campaign insiders are reluctant to publicly acknowledge her substantive role, her imprint on the staff shake-up seems clear. With Hillary as the principal guardian of the candidate's body and mind, it is telling that just before the convention she propelled the couple's longtime friend Susan Thomases -- a sometimes confrontational New York City lawyer -- into the powerful slot of head scheduler. In that role Thomases serves Hillary's agenda to make sure Clinton's tendency to please everyone -- to let discussions drag on, to keep on the campaign trail until he's robotic with fatigue -- does not get the better of him.

"One of the reasons she wanted me to do the scheduling is that she knows I understand that her husband needs sleep and needs time to think," says Thomases. Until recently, she was the epicenter for controversy within the campaign, which may explain why she has received scant public credit for shrewd judgments like doggedly promoting the bus-tour idea within the Clinton camp. Top strategist James Carville defends her in these terms: "The most powerful force in the universe is inertia, and Susan is the most anti-inertia person I know."

Clinton himself, as a ranking insider put it, is "the real manager of this campaign." On the morning after the convention, Clinton told his top aides that he was restructuring the operation. The decision stemmed in part from a campaign flare-up in early June, when several senior staffers complained directly to the candidate about Thomases' tendency to meddle in areas like polling that were far outside her formal role as Hillary's staff director. The ultimate resolution was Thomases' new job as the campaign's internal Dr. No -- the final authority to resist demands on Bill Clinton's time. In a larger shift, campaign chairman Mickey Kantor was in effect kicked upstairs to handle long-term planning on such contingencies as a Clinton-Gore transition as well as handholding the egos of Democratic powers.

Thus emerged the unlikely trio that now holds day-to-day responsibility for directing the campaign -- Carville, George Stephanopoulos and Betsey Wright. Each represents a different facet of the totality that is Clinton. Carville is the grit, the guts and the unyielding determination. Stephanopoulos, like the candidate a Rhodes scholar, mirrors Clinton's thinking and intuits his likely responses. Wright, Clinton's chief of staff during most of his years as Arkansas Governor, is the keeper and the ardent defender of his record.

Carville and Wright are the dominant agenda-setting forces at the 7 a.m. staff meeting in the third-floor war room of the Little Rock headquarters. Even now, the Clinton campaign has an informality that would make a Republican organizational purist wince. Wright, in fact, laughingly calls the campaign structure mystical. To understand the dramatic summer transformation of Clinton's candidacy from junker to juggernaut, take a closer look at the triumphant trio in Little Rock:

THE RAGIN' CAJUN: Carville, 47, is a constant study in coiled tension; he holds his body Marine-style rigid; his brooding brow and his closely cropped, sparse hair all convey the same message as the T shirts and pressed jeans that he favors: This is not a man to be messed with. As Carville describes himself: "I walk the edge between being colorful and controversial."

Carville was a late bloomer -- a Vietnam-era Marine (who was never sent to Vietnam); a Louisiana lawyer reluctant to practice; a political hired gun who moved into the front rank of Democratic consultants only by masterminding last year's upset Pennsylvania Senate victory of Harris Wofford. Carville first met Clinton last summer through another client, Georgia Governor Zell Miller, and joined the campaign in November. Carville's first impression of Clinton: "So this is what major league pitching looks like." But baptism in the big leagues can be brutal, and so it was for Carville, who field-marshaled Clinton's give-no-ground-defense against the fusillade of charges -- ranging from adultery to draft dodging -- that almost destroyed the candidate before the New Hampshire primary.

Yet by April, Carville was a little lost. As an admirer within the Clinton camp puts it: "When James isn't in charge, he tends to lose interest." It wasn't that Carville loafed, it was more that he craved a new adrenaline high. As even he admits, "After the New York primary, I was working, but I didn't put my helmet back on until after California." Now the first among equals in the campaign, Carville is the Count of the Counterpunch, calling the political ploys and postures, the stratagems and sound bites that make up daily campaign gamesmanship.

If Carville is motivated by one principle, it is "Hit 'em back hard." Nothing better reflects his combative personality than the inspirational slogans he posts in the war room. On the central issue of the campaign: THE ECONOMY, STUPID. And on the need for rapid response: SPEED KILLS -- BUSH. Carville's ambitions begin and end with politics, for as he says, "I wouldn't live in a country whose government would have me in it."

THE ALTER EGO: Stephanopoulos' influence in the campaign is no secret -- he is handed over 100 telephone-message slips a day. But still, as a campaign insider puts it: "Everybody underestimates him. He looks like he's 14 years old." With a shock of dark brown hair, a boyish face and an imperturbable, almost brusque manner, Stephanopoulos, 31, is the ultimate quick study. Joining the campaign last summer, after being heavily wooed by Bob Kerrey, Stephanopoulos became Clinton's constant traveling companion throughout the primaries. His mastery of Clinton's ideas and his ability to anticipate the candidate's reactions to any situation is uncanny. Stephanopoulos' explanation: "He's a great teacher."

Stephanopoulos was no slouch as a student either. The son of a dean in the Greek Orthodox Church, he attended Columbia University, where he won his Rhodes. His career in politics was precocious. Starting out as a congressional aide, Stephanopoulos became a deputy communications director for the 1988 Michael Dukakis campaign, where he banged out the political message of the day. After the Dukakis debacle, Stephanopoulos almost left politics for a key job helping run the New York City Public Library before Congressman Richard Gephardt, now House majority leader, offered him a top staff position. Recruited last summer, Stephanopoulos pressed the Clinton campaign hard to get exactly what he wanted -- the post of communications director.

A pivotal moment in the campaign came in May, when Stephanopoulos was detached from Clinton's side to manage the nerve center in Little Rock. Suddenly, good ideas that had been kicking around the campaign were carried out. Media adviser Mandy Grunwald had been arguing for months that Clinton should do The Arsenio Hall Show. In fact, Clinton's comeback may well have begun on Arsenio, when the image of Slick Willie gave way to Saxophone Bill. On a more substantive level, Stephanopoulos directed the drafting of Clinton's new economic plan, now a campaign centerpiece. As Robert Shapiro, a ranking Clinton economic adviser, puts it: "When George says something has to be done, everyone knows he's speaking for Clinton."

THE SECRETARY OF DEFENSE: Wright, 48, first met Clinton when bothwere young liberal idealists working in her native Texas on the 1972 George McGovern campaign. In the mid-1970s she gravitated to Washington, where she ran the Women's National Education Fund, recruiting women candidates for office. After Clinton was defeated for re-election as Governor in 1980, he called upon Wright to run his comeback crusade. She accepted instantly because, as she recalls, "it was always important to me that strong political feminists have relationships with strong male politicians. And Bill Clinton has no problem with strong women."

Wright's reward from the victorious Clinton: he named her his chief of staff, a post she held until 1990. Wright, whose reputation for political toughness belies a far softer interior, had some lonely years serving as the lightning rod for criticism of the Governor. In the late 1980s, she confided with a laugh, "I've made great progress here. When I came in, they hated me for being a woman. Now they only hate me for being the Governor's chief of staff." After a stint chairing the Arkansas Democratic Party, Wright drifted out of politics -- thereby avoiding the early shakedown months of the Clinton campaign. But she returned to Little Rock in the spring to run the campaign's research operation, aggressively defending the Clinton record from Republican attacks and probing press queries.

$ Her rapid rise in the campaign hierarchy -- symbolized by her new title of deputy campaign chairman -- was not without political infighting and moments of drama. But her position is secure because of her deep allegiance to both Clinton and Hillary. During much of the 1980s, Wright spent half her life at the Governor's mansion with the Clintons and their daughter Chelsea. But beyond Wright the loyalist, there is also Wright the champion archivist: the computerized database on the Clinton record that she developed allows her to retrieve any crucial document in minutes.

When South Carolina's Republican Governor Carroll Campbell recently criticized Clinton as a typical tax-and-spend liberal, Wright dug into the files and found a 1989 letter from Campbell praising his Arkansas colleague, which was gleefully released to the press. When she hears about a new G.O.P. attack, Wright is apt to give a rich Texas chuckle, and then say with puckish enjoyment, "I think I've got something on that. Let me check." Likely as not, the result is another Clinton gotcha.

A winning campaign inevitably turns everyone associated with it into a political genius on a par with F.D.R. mastermind James Farley, an honor held only as long as the polls stay high. But the real tests for Carville, Stephanopoulos and Wright will come with the bruising fall contest. In the meantime, the campaigners can recline in their bus seats, roar down the highway and enjoy the cheering throngs. As Wright puts it for all of them: "I'm going to remember these days when things get tough."

With reporting by Priscilla Painton/Little Rock