[MUSIC UP AND UNDER]
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
This is On the Media from NPR.
END SEGMENT B
STATION BREAK 2 (MUSIC)
* SEGMENT C*
BOB GARFIELD:
This is On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
And I'm Brooke Gladstone.
[CLIP]:
[MUSIC UP AND UNDER]
MALE CORRESPONDENT:
Election night!
[CROWD HUBBUB]
MALE CORRESPONDENT:
It’s the top of a new hour, just past 8 o'clock in the East, an hour of power for Bill Clinton. It could be the hour of decision. Bill Clinton wins the keystone state, Pennsylvania.
[APPLAUSE AND CHEERING]
[END CLIP]
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
In 1994, directors Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker released their documentary of the 1992 Clinton campaign, The War Room, with the tagline, “They changed the way campaigns are won.” The “they” were George Stephanopoulos and James Carville, the strategists who managed Clinton’s presidential bid. The change was their decision to put campaigning on a wartime footing, meeting incoming hits against their candidate with rapid-fire counterattacks.

The War Room is brilliant, but it’s not the film the filmmakers intended to make.
CHRIS HEGEDUS:
We really wanted to make a film about a man becoming President.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Director Chris Hegedus says they didn't get the access they asked for.
CHRIS HEGEDUS:
And, you know, although we have glimpses of Bill Clinton, he’s not our main character. It’s really a buddy story about James and George and their whole adventure of a lifetime really, electing a president.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
The War Room set the template for campaigning, not just here but around the world, a film to which would-be Stephanopouli could always return for inspiration.

But the directors only just returned to it after reacquiring the rights. They planned to make a quick look-back as a special feature for the DVD, and set out to reunite the old gang. They found that many were still in constant contact with each other and full of fresh insight.

That’s how they came to make Return of the War Room, airing this month on the Sundance Channel. Director D.A. Pennebaker:
D.A. PENNEBAKER:
Little by little, as we began to descend into the mire, it became clear that we weren't going to get away with an easy gig. We cursed this after [LAUGHING] awhile, but the fact is that, in retrospect, we found out many things that we didn't know and hadn't put in the original War Room.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Among many of the things I didn't know, until I saw Return of the War Room, was that Hillary Clinton had given it its name.
CHRIS HEGEDUS:
Yeah, Hillary was responsible for the name The War Room. James went to her and said that he wanted to set up a strategy central so that all the information could kind of go through one central place and their message could be unified.

And she said, okay, that sounds like a great idea, but, number one, you have to do it in Little Rock and, number two, you should call it the War Room.
D.A. PENNEBAKER:
But she went even further and said we have to have a strategy. We can't let what we do be determined by the news media, by opponents, you know, like a billiard ball gone berserk on a table. We have to have a strategy, we have to hatch it, and James is going to be the one to do that.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
There is a star in the Return film who doesn't make any but the most fleeting appearances in the first film, and that’s Mary Matalin.
D.A. PENNEBAKER:
Yes.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
We learn about the difficult and strained love affair she was having with James Carville at the time.
[CLIP]:
JAMES CARVILLE:
I think it was with Joe Klein, and she and I were having dinner in, in Washington, and I blurted out that I was going to be going to work with Bill Clinton.
MARY MATALIN:
I really thought I was going to throw up. It was somewhere in D.C. I just couldn't – it was - a slap across the face. It was painful on so many different levels, and I ran into the bathroom and I -
JAMES CARVILLE:
She went in the bathroom, and you'd have to ask her, but she was not very pleased.
MARY MATALIN:
I may have retched.
[END CLIP]
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
She also does double duty as a political commentator on the impact of the Clinton campaign strategy on the Bush campaign, where she was highly placed.
D.A. PENNEBAKER:
She stole the film. There’s no question [LAUGHING] in our minds about it.
CHRIS HEGEDUS:
She was so candid and she offered so many insights that I didn't know about, in terms of Ross Perot, and, you know, how serious a threat it really was for them, you know, as well as the problems of running the campaign of an incumbent.
[CLIP]:
MARY MATALIN:
An incumbency is encumbered by its inflexibility. The Clinton people were particularly good at what’s come to be called rapid response, but it wasn't just that they responded rapidly. They thought fast. They could fix mistakes fast. They were really so good at what they did. But they were not burdened by the incumbency.

If we wanted to do something, for instance, well, you'd have to go through the Cabinet secretaries. And I remember the Cabinet secretary said, we can't do that, that’s political. Okay - oh, my God, well, you’re not going to be able to do it, if we lose.
[END CLIP]
CHRIS HEGEDUS:
We have a - another character in our film from the Perot side of things, who was Frank Luntz who, you know, really talks a lot.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
What a surprising charmer in that film.
CHRIS HEGEDUS:
[LAUGHS] Yes.

D.A. PENNEBAKER:
Isn't he marvelous? I love him.
[LAUGHTER]
CHRIS HEGEDUS:
He’s great.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
He is the -
D.A. PENNEBAKER:
Love him.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
He is the Republican strategist who came up with phrases like “climate change” to replace “global warming” and “death tax” to replace “inheritance tax.” This is a talent that he says he learned from that Clinton campaign.
[CLIP]:
FRANK LUNTZ:
All of these different words and phrases have been brought in. School vouchers became opportunity scholarships and education choice became parental choice. It’s all because of Clinton. And after he did it, I wanted to do it for those right of center, to be at least as good as what he was doing for people left of center.
[END CLIP]
D.A. PENNEBAKER:
When I first laid eyes on him, he said something and I thought, he’s kind of like a, a boy genius, you know, and this may be very difficult. And it was a complete pleasure. [BROOKE LAUGHS] Talking to him was such [LAUGHING] an interesting thing, I never – I didn't want to leave.
CHRIS HEGEDUS:
Well, we met him outside the Senate building, and he’s sitting on a bench there. And lobbyists are just streaming by constantly, and he’s calling out to them [LAUGHS], you know – “How’d your bill go?” [LAUGHS] You know?
[LAUGHTER]
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Dennis Kucinich comes by in the film -
[LAUGHTER]
- and they're slapping each other’s backs.
[CLIP]:
FRANK LUNTZ:
By the way, this guy here, I don't think we agree on anything political.
[LAUGHTER]
He’s one of my favorite people.
[OFF-MIKE COMMENTS]
And what’s cool is – and this is the way it used to be – we had dinner a couple of weeks ago – it used to be that you would argue by day and get along by night.
[LAUGHTER]
We're like the last people who get along.
[LAUGHTER]
And it’s really sad.
DENNIS KUCINICH:
Good to see you, Frank.
FRANK LUNTZ:
But it’s great seeing you.
[END CLIP]
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
So there’s nostalgia there. I also felt a little bit of nostalgia for the technology that we saw in the original film – faxes, giant cell phones – and yet they were able to react so efficiently. You have several people in your film saying that it’s a joke compared to what’s available to them today.
[CLIP]:
MAN
It was all moving, in today’s terms, at a dinosaur pace [LAUGHS], you know?
WOMAN
Everyone would gather to watch the evening news together because that became the headlines in the newspaper the next morning.
MAN:
Literally, you had - somebody had to like stay up at night and get the – we had to get the newspapers, courier it in. There wasn't email. Or people would sit by the fax machine and wait for stuff to come in, So it was a little - you know, a lot of things that we did then seem so antiquated now.
[END CLIP]
CHRIS HEGEDUS:
But I think they did a lot of novel things back in ’92, for the technology they had. The Bush campaign, you know, were really slower and behind the times in a lot of things, to the point of I remember when Clinton finally, you know, won and they went into the White House, one of the funniest things was that they only had typewriters in the White House, and the campaign couldn't believe it. There were no plugs around [LAUGHS] - that they could put their computers.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
After your film, war rooms popped up in campaigns of aspiring politicians all around the world.
CHRIS HEGEDUS:
The War Room itself generated a tremendous interest to the point where, I mean, you have in the film Stan Greenberg, the pollster, saying that he was hired by Tony Blair. And Blair not only wanted to know the philosophy behind the war room but he wanted to physically see the layout, the blueprints of the war room. They tacked them on the wall.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Do you think that in the current political environment, when candidates never speak off the record to reporters anymore, when any random remark can be captured on a cell phone and sent around the world on YouTube, that any campaign today would let you in to wander around their back rooms?
D.A. PENNEBAKER:
Well, you're tempted to say no, because it just seems hard, but I think, you know, you can always find somebody to marry you.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker, thank you very much.
D.A. PENNEBAKER:
Well -
CHRIS HEGEDUS:
Thank you.
D.A. PENNEBAKER:
- thank you, Brooke Gladstone. We have a great time here.
[LAUGHTER]

BROOKE GLADSTONE:
Pennebaker and Hegedus co-directed and edited 1993’s The War Room. Return of the War Room is airing this month on the Sundance Channel, next showing, October 27th.
[CLIP]:
[APPLAUSE]
BILL CLINTON:
And finally I want to thank the members of my brilliant, aggressive, unconventional but always winning campaign staff.
[APPLAUSE AND CHEERS]
And they have earned this.
[APPLAUSE, WHISTLE/CHEERS/MUSIC]
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