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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.