George Stephanopoulos - Clinton Administration

Clinton Administration

Stephanopoulos was, along with David Wilhelm and James Carville, a leading member of Clinton's 1992 U.S. presidential campaign. His role on the campaign is portrayed in the documentary film The War Room (1993).

At the outset of Clinton's presidency, Stephanopoulos served as the de facto press secretary, briefing the press even though Dee Dee Myers was officially the White House Press Secretary. Later, he was moved to Senior Advisor on Policy and Strategy, when Myers began personally conducting the briefings (following several verbal missteps by Stephanopoulos) and David Gergen was brought in as the new White House Communications Director. The move was largely viewed as a rebuke to Stephanopoulos's handling of public relations during the first six months of the Clinton administration.

On February 25, 1994, Stephanopoulos and Harold Ickes had a conference call with Roger Altman to discuss the Resolution Trust Corporation's choice of Republican lawyer Jay Stephens to head the Madison Guaranty investigation, that later turned into the Whitewater controversy.

Stephanopoulos resigned from the Clinton administration shortly after Clinton was re-elected in 1996.

His memoir, All Too Human: A Political Education (1999), was published after he left the White House during Clinton's second term. It quickly became a number-one bestseller on The New York Times Best Seller list. In the book, Stephanopoulos spoke of his depression and how his face broke out into hives due to the pressures of conveying the Clinton White House message. Clinton referred to the book in his autobiography, My Life, apologizing for what he felt in retrospect to be excessive demands placed on the young staffer.

Stephanopoulos's book covers his time with Clinton from the day he met him in September 1991 to the day Stephanopoulos left the White House in December 1996, through two presidential campaigns and four years in the White House. Stephanopoulos describes Clinton in the book as a "complicated man responding to the pressures and pleasures of public life in ways I found both awesome and appalling".