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With Morris around, Clinton doesn't have to devote every waking hour to political calculation. He knows Morris will take care of that. He can concentrate on being the benevolent father that Americans--and his own self-image and strategy--seem to require. As Morris once told Clinton biographer David Maraniss, Clinton needs to be engaged in "some important, valiant fight for the good of the world to lend coherence and structure to his life. When he didn't have those fights, he would eat away at himself, he would become depressed, paranoid, surly and, one suspects, escapist." Morris neutralizes that side of Clinton--and makes this presidency possible--by playing the game so well that Clinton can almost forget he is playing it. So Clinton can go to a rally where voters scolded him for calling Bob Dole a quitter when he left the Senate, then berate Morris for making the TV spot that called Dole that--even though it was Clinton who approved it. "Dick always worked the dark side," says Rudy Moore, a Clinton aide in Arkansas, "so Bill could move toward the light." In a series of exclusive, wide-ranging interviews with Time, Morris put it this way: "He shaped me into his tool. He looked at his life and saw what he needed, and I became that."
While the rest of the Clinton team cautions that the race will tighten, Morris predicts a rout. "The President will win by at least 10 points," he says, "and take back the House and Senate too." His cocksure style is a foil for Clinton's indecision. Morris likes to plunge into action; Clinton would just as soon wait and see. "Clinton loves to shop, and Morris loves to buy," says a White House official. "Clinton wants to browse forever; Morris wants to make off with the whole bookstore. It's a perfect marriage."
With apologies to the candidates, Morris may be the most intriguing character in this campaign. And what's astonishing about him is that he sits at the right hand of a President who cannot quite trust him. He's a Democrat turned Republican turned Democrat again, a longtime Clinton adviser who for two years traveled the country telling Republicans that in 1996 Clinton would be defeated--if not indicted. Which begs a question: How did such a rogue become the most influential private citizen in America?
MORRIS TAKES MANHATTAN
Morris, 48, is one of those rare humans who seem to burst into life fully formed, already knowing what they know. His subject from birth was politics--not the liberal idealism so fashionable during his youth but the fierce, old-fashioned power plays of the New York City clubhouse system.
Growing up in Manhattan, Morris often joined his father for long walks through the city. Eugene Morris would give his only child lessons in political organization, patronage and the favor-bank system. A top real estate lawyer who did the deals that created Lincoln Center, Gene Morris had learned from a master: his uncle Al Cohn, the Democratic boss of the Bronx. Cohn had raised Gene like a son after Gene's natural father abandoned him. Cohn's youngest child was Roy Cohn, who grew up to be one of the most hated and feared right-wing power brokers of his generation. Another Morris cousin is the liberal cartoonist Jules Feiffer. The tug of opposing ideologies is encoded in his genes.