The staff's foremost weapon was the ability to select the information the president received. Clinton didn't really read the newspapers. He got a collection of clips every day from more than a dozen newspapers: The Washington Post, The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, The Miami Herald, The Boston Globe, The Hartford Courant, the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, and a few others. The clipping file also included a summary of the previous night's network news shows.

I don't think he read the clips much. Dozens of times I would mention a front-page story of great importance in The New York Times or The Washington Post, the first two papers in the file, and he had not seen them. He almost never knew what was on the nightly news. In my weekly meetings, I began including a summary of the content of the TV news and the frequency of front-page mentions of topics in twenty-five of the nation's newspapers. It was all new information to him.

But he did not underrate the power of the press. "The people don't get it that the press runs the government," he said in March 1995. He thinks of the press in highly personal terms, seeing each story as a reflection of the biases of the writer or reporter. "They love to destroy people. That's how they get their rocks off."

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