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Clinton imposed a daunting 100-day deadline for Magaziner: he asked for a report by early May. In his Feb. 17 speech to Congress about his economic program, Clinton went further, ad-libbing a line that repeated his impossible campaign promise to enact the measure in 1993. And then he turned his attention to the budget.
Organizing the task force and its 450 members quickly devolved into frenzy. On leave from other agencies, 200 federal officials trekked daily to the Old Executive Office Building, only to discover they had to wait in long lines at the Secret Service checkpoints. The service's computers routinely deleted the names of people who just went out for lunch. A code of secrecy meant that no directory was widely available to assist task-force members in contacting one another. Sessions were delayed or completely canceled for lack of space in meeting rooms. Robert Valdez, a UCLA public-health professor who eventually served as co-chairman of the benefits working group, arrived in Washington late one night only to be told he was presenting an overview at the first meeting the next morning. "Presenting?" asked Valdez. "Presenting what?" Recalls Harvard internist Arnold Epstein: "The whole thing was like a four- alarm fire."
Magaziner called his biggest conferences "tollgates," a management-theory term applied to meetings in which progress reports are delivered and course corrections made. Linda Bergthold, a private consultant from San Francisco, remembers them as "a cross between Ph.D. orals and the Spanish Inquisition." Members crammed a meeting room on the fourth floor of the Old E.O.B. until the room grew so crowded that they sat on the floor and windowsills and peeked in the door. A lack of coatracks forced members to dump wraps on the floor. At each session, task-force leaders would present their progress on, for example, the emerging benefits package. Magaziner would listen, ask questions and nudge members in the direction he wanted. Magaziner kept the Clintons abreast of progress, and the President sometimes invited individual members over for briefings in the Roosevelt Room of the White House. Tollgates would go on for 10 or 12 hours, sometimes 16, break for three or four, and then resume, often late at night. The process reached an absurd point when a tollgate continued past 2 o'clock on a Sunday morning.
Magaziner's eccentricity drove his colleagues to distraction. Little was committed to paper because nothing was decided with any finality. "Everything just keeps accumulating in Ira's head," said a task-force member. At one point, members pushed Magaziner to lay out the plan -- as it then stood -- in a two-page memo, but he resisted the idea, warning colleagues that too many details were leaking. In what some took as divine intervention, a flu epidemic swept through the task force in late spring, temporarily sidelining dozens of ! participants. Even Magaziner, who was bearing up better than most, caught walking pneumonia. Late one night, while toiling over financing provisions so arcane that even he found them confusing, Magaziner quipped, "Next time, I'm voting for Perot."