George in the Jungle

No White House aide has ever had the high-profile glamour of George Stephanopoulos, the 33-year-old son of a Greek Orthodox priest, who is now, after Hillary, the president's closest adviser. His true power, however, lies in the relentless tension between two Georges: the onetime altar boy and the skilled politico. As the Whitewater scandal rocks the administration, MARJORIE WILLIAMS explains why Stephanopoulos is so important to Bill Clinton

MARJORIE WILLIAMS

'This is all new to me, first of all," he says. ''I mean, it's all happened very quickly."

This?

He laughs, flashes his diffident smile. Or, rather, his Diffident Smile: a reporter dealing with George Stephanopoulos can never entirely escape the sense that beneath his great likability lies a catalogue of gestures, each one more deliberate than the last. "This," he answers, patting his desk in a motion that somehow takes in the entire strange experience of his first year in Bill Clinton's roller coaster of a White House: the weighty work that's scattered in front of him, what he calls the "narcotic" of working on the threshold of the Oval Office, and the unseemly recent attentions of magazines such as People.

He is explaining why he resists talking about his personal life, including his early family life. "I think if you're doing this kind of work in this kind of life, you're getting this kind of attention, you have to do what you can to keep some things private, and—you know, even sacred."

It's a big word, sacred; it is Stephanopoulos's trump card, and he plays it with finesse.

At the age of only 33, Stephanopoulos has pioneered a kind of cultural stardom unprecedented in the gray precincts of the capital. Surely no other aide in White House annals has inspired the creation of a fan club, complete with its own fanzine, the Stephanopouletter. Nor has anyone else in Clinton's circle had to requisition extra space in the Old Executive Office Building to handle the overflow of his own fan mail—including photographs mailed in by hopeful young women. As Stephanopoulos groused to an old friend, ''I can hardly go to McDonald's without it getting in the paper."

At the same time—much more quietly—he has become one of the central figures of the Clinton White House. Last May, when he was pulled from the job of spokesman and David Gergen was hired to improve the administration's public relations, it was widely assumed that Stephanopoulos had fallen from favor. The press cast him as Icarus—an object lesson in the perils of peaking early.

But now, as the Clinton administration enters its second year, it is clear that this analysis of his fortunes was wrong. As Stephanopoulos's friends insisted all along, the May reshuffle removed the parts of his job he most disliked (the same parts—though his friends were not as quick to acknowledge this—that he did badly), and increased his time at the part of the job he enjoyed (and did well): the role of senior adviser to the president for policy and strategy. Today, Stephanopoulos is perhaps the president's chief political intimate after the First Lady.

The evolution of his role can be summarized in the twin controversies that erupted this winter. When two Arkansas state troopers went public with their tales of Bill Clinton's revels in Little Rock, it wasn't George Stephanopoulos who had to face the braying pack. (A nightmare averted: George! Is it true the president eats his baked potatoes in two bites? George! Did he really do it with a departmentstore clerk in the parking lot of Chelsea's elementary school?) But as the murky tale of the Whitewater Development Company began to reach critical mass, and it became clear the administration could no longer prevent the appointment of a special counsel, Stephanopoulos became an important part of the damage-control team appointed to deal with the mess. He may no longer be out front every day, but in a crisis, Stephanopoulos is the indispensable man. It was Stephanopoulos who talked to the most important members of the press about Whitewater, intoning his usual soft-voiced denials and demurrals on the phone; it was still Stephanopoulos who was counted on for advice that would be unsentimental, realistic, and equally shrewd about the politics of Congress, the appetites of the media, and the dynamics of scandal.

Handling crises like Whitewater—sudden problems of high sensitivity—is one facet of Stephanopoulos's work. Another is his heavy involvement in managing the administration's dealings with Congress, especially with the House of Representatives, where Stephanopoulos has spent most of his career. In addition, he is the aide physically closest to the president, helping to organize and impose some discipline on Clinton's time from day to day. Recording everything in a reporter's notebook—what happened at a meeting, what follow-up is required, what promises were made and must be kept—he has brought a measure of consistency to a chaotic White House staff structure that has all roads leading directly to Clinton.

"Clinton wears his heart on his sleeve. George wears his heart hidden under several layers of armor."

Beyond that, his job description—deceptively simple—is to give advice to the president. His value to Clinton is that he's fluent in both politics and policy. "On everything of consequence," says Paul Begala, a political consultant to the White House, "George's opinion matters."

The reasons for Clinton's trust in Stephanopoulos run deep, and include the two men's almost perfectly contrasting natures. But to understand why George Stephanopoulos is where he is today, it may be most helpful to look hard at that word "sacred," and at the ease with which it leaves his lips. In a world full of work-obsessed, reasonably goodlooking, politically ambitious young men, Stephanopoulos has always stood out for the fact that he is the son, grandson, and nephew of Greek Orthodox priests; a former altar boy; a onetime student of theology as a Rhodes scholar.

At the heart of him, friends say, is a conflict: the age-old moral turmoil of the young man who has come to pursue good ends in a system that calls for calculating means—and who happens to have a natural gift for working that system. These friends believe that Stephanopoulos's spiritual side is the dominant one. On the other hand, those who know him only in the context of his career in Washington scoff at the very idea that there's a contest taking place.

What both sides miss is the intriguing truth that George Stephanopoulos's religious background and spiritual aspirations serve, among other things, to make him a more potent political animal. Undoubtedly, they supply some of the extreme, almost eerie calm that this young man brings to the exercise of power. They also lend him, when necessary, the useful camouflage of the choirboy. "He has a sort of second sense for how to make people like him when he screws them, make them feel it's not his fault," says author Eric Alterman, his best friend.

But more than that, they constitute an important part of his complex appeal to the president he works for: Bill Clinton, a man who loves the fruits of compromise but treasures the idea of his own unbending goodness.

Stephanopoulos agrees to a conversation in his White House office on a quiet holiday afternoon. "I have to tell you, this is very disconcerting," he says, settling back in his chair. At ease in jeans and a dark cotton shirt, his thick black hair neatly disheveled, with a cup of tea steaming on his desktop, he looks not the least bit disconcerted.

It is easy to see why the White House press corps found him arrogant. From his very first press conferences, his demeanor had an unmistakably snarky edge—a clear air of contempt for the grubby scribes who pestered him with their repetitive, process-obsessed questions. To this day, says a friend, "he hates the press."

But one-on-one Stephanopoulos can be charming. He is, to begin with, one of those mysteriously sexy men who belong to no standard genre of good looks. His appeal— indefinably contained in his quiet voice and his fine smile and his squarish face—transcends the fact that he stands only about five feet seven and carries his small frame in a slight crouch, as if protecting something at its center.

Beyond that, he projects a certain modesty. It might or might not be genuine, but it is in any case persuasive enough to be effective. When I ask him if he has read Remembering Denny, Calvin Trillin's compelling meditation on an old friend whose Rhodes scholarship turned out to be the pinnacle of a life of unfulfilled promise, the boy wonder offers a fabulous grin. "No," he says. "I'm too scared."

Stephanopoulos seems to have a grip on the strange alchemy that has suddenly transformed his life. Upon the release of The War Room, the recent documentary that focused on the contributions of Stephanopoulos and strategist James Carville to Clinton's presidential victory, Alterman teased his old friend about press materials that described him as Clinton's "brilliant, handsome" communications director. "George, I never thought you were that handsome," Alterman said.

Replied Stephanopoulos, "I wasn't."

That's not to say that he doesn't enjoy the fuss. His record of attendance at parties—large, small, and medium, with Hollywood names and Washington royalty—suggests that he relishes the social perks of fame. Then there was his well-publicized, now defunct romance with Dirty Dancing star Jennifer Grey. Stephanopoulos has complained angrily about the publicity that attended his dates with her, especially, friends say, about false reports that he had broken up with a long-term girlfriend, a woman he had been dating for about three years, in order to take up with Grey. In fact, the woman in question, an attorney who now works for the Justice Department, had broken up with him—for reasons, according to friends, that included religious differences (she is Jewish) and the obsessive nature of his work life.

Asked if he will discuss his romantic life for this article, Stephanopoulos laughs and says, "Aggressively no. Emphatically no!" However, there is pleasure in his smile: he may decline, but he enjoys having to.

"In a way, he's modest," summarizes a White House colleague who is struggling to explain Stephanopoulos. "But then, he's 33 years old and doesn't feel the least bit of self-doubt about where he is. It's not as though he got where he is by shunning the spotlight. . . . He's not just a nice young boy from Cleveland that this happened to."

Indeed, Stephanopoulos has an uncanny awareness of himself as a logical object of interest. He discusses his own life as if it were an object, one the two of us have sat down together to appreciate in tandem: this aspect of his character has been ' 'overdone, ' ' he'll say in response to a question; this other one has been "blown so out of proportion." Asked to label his political philosophy, he bridles, then says, "I guess I'm a liberal. ' ' But then he must carefully distinguish himself from all the other, presumably less thoughtful souls who share that label: "I mean, it's a different—I end up being a liberal," he says, ''not 'I am a liberal, therefore I think this.' ... I end up being a modified liberal."

This self-consciousness, though, seems at constant war with another facet of the man: beneath George Stephanopoulos's political geniality and his enjoyment of fame lives a deeply reserved, self-contained young man.

''There are many things about George I have no idea about, and I consider myself a fairly close friend of his," says a colleague. ''He's wound very tight."

Charles C. Moskos, author of Greek Americans: Struggle and Success, notes that the Greek-American men who have been most successful in politics—men such as Stephanopoulos, Paul Tsongas, and Michael Dukakis—''tend to be somewhat reserved personalities, unlike the Zorba the Greek image. There's an old Jewish saying, 'Think Yiddish, dress British.' The Greeks have a version of that."

This reserve is a political gift of sorts, setting him apart from the grasping and clawing of his brethren. ''All the internecine crap that happens in a campaign—he was never part of that," says Richard Mintz, a campaign aide who shared a Little Rock apartment with Stephanopoulos. ''George never would bicker or speculate about who was up and who was down." Mintz laughs, and adds, ''If we were talking about it, he would listen, but he'd never weigh in."

He was only 28 when he was hired as chief floor assistant to House majority leader Richard Gephardt, a job in which he essentially represented his boss to all the members of Congress. Paul Begala, who also worked in Gephardt's office, was struck by Stephanopoulos's ability to deal with the old bulls who had spent decades amassing power. ''He never sucked up; you never heard him say, 'Oh, Mr. Chairman, that's a nice tie.' He was never intimidated, either. There is nothing more intimidating than being confronted with a John Dingell or a Dan Rostenkowski face-to-face. And in George's case, it's face-to-belt-buckle. ... I saw George many times standing up to these guys."

These colleagues are describing the most striking thing about George Stephanopoulos: that he has a preternatural poise for someone in his early 30s.

After a time, his interview responses come to seem strenuously correct, with each thought followed by its tempering counterthought, until at last he has defined the narrow, justright path he walks. ''I grew up with the feeling that it's not enough to work for yourself," he says—and, before the period at the end of that sentence has fallen into place, hastily adds, "solely," lest you think he is making too high a moral claim for the work he does. ''I mean, I'm not working in a village, you know, feeding people. I don't like when people try to make something like this sound like that. Not to take anything away from the work: I think it is as high and good a work as you can do."

"George needs a secretary to just be a human being," says his best friend ''He's just not good at life."

You can't blame him for picking his words carefully. George Stephanopoulos is not just a political star; he is also a generational star, symbolizing the arrival of the boomers (or their kid brothers) at the very highest levels of responsibility. And you can see him watching from within a stilldawning awareness of the envy and ambivalence he can incite in those around him.

But through all these efforts to sound just right—altruistic but not pious, caring but not self-congratulatory—shines that clear sense of his own singularity: It is important that I get this right, say his hesitations and emendations. This is George we 're talking about.

It is a quality different from arrogance or conceit; one has the impression that this is the axis of his life: the need to calibrate carefully, precisely, what he thinks and feels. More than anything else, it seems simply the self-involvement, the self-scrutiny, of a young man who really did occupy a singular place in the universe for all the earliest years of his life.

Those who know Stephanopoulos well agree that his roots in the Greek Orthodox Church are ''crucial to understanding George," in the words of Eric Alterman. "The key is that he is the son of a middle-class American priest. ' ' George was the second of four closely spaced children, and the elder son. He often went with his parents on visits to parishioners, or with his father to make calls at the hospital-early training in the skills of diplomacy and deference. He acknowledges that this has been helpful in his political career: ''I remember when I interviewed with Dick Gephardt he asked me how I could do [the floor manager's] job—which was working with all the members. . . . And I said, 'It's how I grew up.' "

His poise is probably common to all clergymen's children. But the Greek Orthodox Church in particular emphasizes the place of priests' families, according to Nancy Agris Savage, who edits the leading Greek-American newspaper, The Hellenic Chronicle. ''The wife and the children, they're held up to the community, and they're expected never to get into trouble, always to be an example."

Thus Stephanopoulos lived out his childhood under the concentrated gaze of a series of tight-knit communities as his father moved from parish to parish: from Fall River, Massachusetts, where George was bom, to Purchase, New York, to the Cleveland suburb where he went through high school.

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Another person very familiar with Stephanopoulos's background says, "The discipline, the need to always do the right thing, to be correct, has to be related to being the priest's son. . . . It's a mind-set: I can't imagine you would ever shut that off completely."

Since 1982, George's father has been dean of the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity on Manhattan's Upper East Side, the church of the archdiocese that oversees all of North and South America; this makes Father Stephanopoulos, in essence, the senior priest in the Americas below the rank of bishop. (While married men are permitted to become Greek Orthodox priests, only a man who practices celibacy is eligible to become a bishop.) To see Father Robert George Stephanopoulos in his heavily brocaded robes, leading in Greek the highly ritualized Sunday-morning liturgy that is the central ceremony of the faith, is to begin to understand the strength of the legacy George inherited.

Until George was about 14, the priesthood appealed to him as a career. Even once he realized that his interests lay elsewhere, the idea of the priesthood remained an important presence in his life. George, explains Alterman, "was always answerable to the idea that he should have been a priest." Echoes Edward Feighan, a former congressman with whom he worked for four years, "There was clearly an understanding that if George did not become a Greek Orthodox priest, continuing the generational experience, he must at least aspire to a life that made as consequential a contribution."

In describing the expectations conferred by George's background, however, many people blur the concepts of measuring up morally to the priesthood and measuring up to Greek-Americans' communal notion of secular success.

Charles Moskos explains that GreekAmericans are among the most achievement-oriented ethnic groups in the country. "You have to be validated by the American society in order to be a true success in the Greek community," he says. Parents place major emphasis on sending their children to the right schools and into the best white-collar professions.

In George's case, the push toward achievement came also from a whole community: as the son of the priest he was, in an important way, the child of the whole parish, and great things were expected of him.

Within the family, however, that push was probably conveyed less by "Father Bob," as he is called by parishioners, than by George's mother, who, after the liturgy ends at noon, presides over a coffee hour in the church basement. Nikki Stephanopoulos is a short, deep-voiced, briskly friendly lady who entertains her husband's well-to-do flock with a managerial charm. It is instantly apparent that she gave her elder son both his nose and his drive.

Despite her son's request that his parents not give me an interview, she has matter-offactly accepted a reporter's presence at church. "Everyone's welcome at church," she said in advance, over the phone. Now it is she who steers the conversation from a general discussion of the service to the subject of her elder son—"the apple of her eye," according to a family friend. "If you saw the altar boys," Mrs. Stephanopoulos tells me, "then you know what George did from the time he was four."

That early?

"Well, five," she concedes. "Most don't start until eight or nine."

A few minutes later, she explains how successful George's entire "class" of altar boys turned out to be: in addition to George, she notes proudly, that crop yielded two orthopedic surgeons.

Today, George's older sister is a Greek Orthodox nun. His younger sister is an office manager for a medical practice, and his younger brother manages alternative-rock bands, including Mercury Rev and Gumball. Of the four Stephanopoulos children, only George threw himself into the task of honoring both sides of the family legacy: the ethic of service represented by his father, and the drive toward success so important to his mother.

Even in a business full of obsessive workers, Stephanopoulos stands out for his single-mindedness. "He has a side to him which is almost machine-like when he's sharply focused on something," says Los Angeles Times correspondent David Lauter, who covered the 1992 presidential race. ' 'It got to the point, in the last couple of months of the campaign, where you could walk up behind him and say, 'Did you hear that George Bush just announced he was releasing some papers that prove Bill Clinton is a Martian alien?' and he would turn around and immediately give you the spin: 'Oh, well, being a Martian alien isn't a disqualification for office.'

George is the star at forcing Clinton to deal with "stuff he doesn't like to face,' says an aide.

"You'd say, 'George, it's a joke!' But he had completely lost that side of himself, because he couldn't waste time on anything that didn't have to do with getting his job done. It was very effective, obviously, but it was also a little frightening." By November '92, Lauter remembers, Stephanopoulos showed only one sign of stress: there were angry red sores around all his cuticles from his nervous habit of picking at his fingers.

Stephanopoulos's will to perform showed itself as far back as high school, when he was a top student in the Cleveland suburb of Orange Village. While academics came naturally to him, the more revealing arena was sports, where he was not a natural, but a grimly determined competitor.

After wrestling in the 98-pound class as a high-school junior, George tried to starve himself down to the same weight senior year, wearing his wrestling sweats through the school day. He made it as far as 99 pounds. "George looked like he was one step out of a concentration camp," recalls Brian Kretch, who was on the wrestling team with him. "He was killing himself to do this. It was kind of like he wanted to see how far he could stretch himself. ' '

Friends agree that as a teenager ' 'he had a hard time not being right," as his childhood neighbor Tom Radis recalls it. Kretch remembers that Stephanopoulos could spend an entire evening kicking himself over a poker hand he had played badly. "And when he's wrong, it's like 7'm human/' Like it's a flaw or something."

Radis tells an extraordinary story, first reported in an article in The Cleveland Free Times. One evening, in an effort to challenge their friend George's infallibility, Radis and others played a prank: after George phoned in the group's pizza order, Radis called and changed the order. Sure enough, when they picked up the pizza, it had the wrong toppings—and George's friends began ribbing him about his uncharacteristic "mistake." As Radis remembers it, Stephanopoulos was so upset by this that he hyperventilated, and actually passed out in the car.

"George is not fond of that story," notes Radis—quite accurately. When asked about it, Stephanopoulos throws himself into an impassioned dissection of precisely how the incident bothered him, insisting that he knew at the time he'd been right. "It would have been one thing to have been wrong, but it was another to pretty much know you're right and just be cheated. ... If I would have gotten that upset over just being wrong, that's a different story from knowing I'm right and having been cheated and getting angry about that!"

Is it important to him to be right?

"Yeah. Sure. Or not to be wronged. Both. . . . But I get really upset, probably overly upset, when I think that something is not fair." He catches himself, and adds, "Even though I know nothing's fair."

This, friends say, was what irked him most about the common belief that he had been demoted last May, when Gergen was hired. "What was painful was the public perception that he had done something wrong that he was being punished for in some way," says media adviser Mandy Grunwald. ''Because he's obviously a perfectionist."

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Perhaps this is why Stephanopoulos is always looking ahead to disaster. During the campaign, he was famous as the staff member who took the most dismal view possible of any setback. ''George is dark today," other advisers would caution one another. "If I had a dollar for every time George Stephanopoulos said, 'That's it; it's over,' I would be a wealthy man," says Paul Begala. While everyone describes this as "Georgie's" shtick, it comes up so often that one senses it is more than a political outlook.

Stephanopoulos resists the idea that he is by character a pessimist, but even in trying to shoot it down, he can't quite spit out a full sentence of unalloyed sunniness. The best he can do is "I think that I'm a probably deeply fairly optimistic person."

The flip side of Stephanopoulos's great focus is a certain fogginess about details that don't contribute to the mission. "George needs a secretary to just be a human being," says Alterman. "He's just not good at life."

On the morning of the inauguration he had worked so hard to bring about, Stephanopoulos, according to an old friend, had to flag down a police car near his apartment at the last minute to get to the ceremony on time: it just hadn't occurred to him that traffic would be at a standstill in downtown Washington. And after a recent dinner at a trendy restaurant, the valet-parking attendant had to jump-start his battered red Honda in order to get it to the curb.

He has long had expensive tastes in a few areas—clothes, for example, and fine liquor. (He has been known to return a glass of scotch in a restaurant, denouncing it as something other than the exact brand of single-malt he ordered.) But the truth of Stephanopoulos's personal life is that it hasn't quite caught up to his famous image.

In the typical Washington career, success is accompanied by a move out to suburban Maryland or Virginia, or, if you are a liberal, to the leafier reaches of the city's northwest quadrant. Stephanopoulos lives in an apartment not far from Dupont Circle in downtown Washington—a relatively transient neighborhood that is home to a large part of the city's gay population and to twentyand thirtysomething singles and couples who are only one or two jobs into their careers.

His apartment is messy, according to friends, and strewn with books. Stephanopoulos mostly eats out at one of a number of neighborhood restaurants—including, often, Alekos, a Greek place a few blocks down Connecticut Avenue, where he is greeted as a demigod. Says Dave Pomerantz, an old friend from Cleveland, "I don't remember George ever having anything in his refrigerator except for a bottle of seltzer water. ' '

Not that he spends much time at home: between his schedule at the White House, which starts around 6:30 in the morning and ends at close to 8 P.M., and the hourlong workout he schedules every day, Stephanopoulos doesn't have much time to have a life. At night, he says, "I go to dinner and then go to bed."

"He misses having another life," says Richard Mintz. But then he adds, "A bunch of us made the decision, after the campaign was over, to regain the balance in our lives. I don't think George did."

Friends hint that he has an active dating life—but the same friends are fiercely protective of his privacy. Stephanopoulos's appeal to women is a source of wonder among friends; even the president teases him about it, telling him, "Hey, George, I was out in Seattle. And they didn't want to hear about my plans; they wanted to hear about you."

It is hard to put a finger on when Stephanopoulos became aware of his effect on the opposite sex. It wasn't in high school: according to Pomerantz, "The six or eight of us guys who hung together, we had about five dates in four years between us all." But by his mid20s, when he was Feighan's top staffer, he was turning heads. "I don't think there was any female in the office who didn't have a crush on him," says Jeff Hagan, who did temporary work for Feighan's office. "And maybe a few of the guys, too."

But Paul Begala says he doesn't believe Stephanopoulos is much interested in settling down, even if he did have time for a personal life. "He handles my baby like he's radioactive," says Begala. "I think he likes it the way it is. He's a real bachelor. ' ' Recently Stephanopoulos observed to an acquaintance that he can't date Greek-American women, "because when you ask them out, you have to marry them." This probably doesn't stop every Greek mama in the country from dreaming of George as the perfect sonin-law, and anytime he receives an award from or gives a speech to a Greek-American organization, young women turn out in force, in low-cut dresses, to see the land's most eligible Greek bachelor.

"I found out when I got out of college that this is what I could do," he says simply, gesturing again at the symbolically laden desk. "I mean, I'd been good in school and everything, but this is what I really just knew how to do."

When Stephanopoulos came to Washington in 1982, a summa cum laude graduate of Columbia, he was only beginning to sort out his political leanings. In 1980, he had briefly flirted with becoming a Bush delegate, but found his politics moving leftward in reaction to the Reagan administration. Though he evolved into a partisan liberal, Stephanopoulos would always strike some critics as a politically amorphous being. When he went looking for a campaign to join in '92, says one colleague from the Clinton effort, he "didn't choose a candidate on the basis of what he stood for. He was looking for a winner. ' '

But while it is true that Stephanopoulos has adapted easily to somewhat dissimilar politicians—the very liberal Feighan, the more moderate, businessoriented Gephardt, and the protean Clinton, who sometimes seems to incorporate all his party's positions—this complaint about Stephanopoulos misses the point. The more interesting question about him concerns not whom he works for but how he functions, how the onetime altar boy finds himself in a job that calls for a lethal set of political skills.

That question hints at the useful tension that has propelled him through his professional life: between the altruistic and the worldly drives that were his father's and his mother's legacies.

Two years out of college, he faced the first of the interesting crossroads that would present him with a choice between his family's two definitions of success. He was loving life as a young foreignpolicy staffer for Feighan, but he also knew that the itinerant, low-paying life of a Hill Rat could not, ultimately, fulfill the grand expectations that surrounded him. He applied, reluctantly, to Harvard Law, and promised his parents he would go. He won a reprieve by succeeding in his second application for a Rhodes scholarship—a break that gave him the chance to study Christian political thought and ethics instead of torts and tax litigation.

Again and again, he would avoid choosing the wholly careerist path. On the other hand, he would also ultimately reject—despite feints in this direction—choices that were primarily altruistic. After Oxford, for example, he thought about joining the Peace Corps, but instead returned to Feighan's staff, with a promotion. After serving in the 1988 Dukakis campaign, he left Washington entirely to work as assistant to Father Timothy Healy, the new president of the New York Public Library, but returned after only three months when an irresistible job opened up in the office of Majority Leader Gephardt. When Gephardt decided not to run for president in 1992, dashing Stephanopoulos's hopes of serving in the top circle of his campaign, George toyed with the idea of leaving politics to work in famine relief. In the end, of course, he joined Bill Clinton's campaign.

Stephanopoulos's divided impulses were also evident in his personal life, where he has a history of forming important relationships with men and women involved in direct services to the helpless or indigent. ' 'George has a bedrock appreciation for where real stuff happens—in homeless shelters, in classrooms, in private conversations between people and their priests and nuns," says Dan Porterfield, a fellow Rhodes scholar who was running an education program for immigrant children when he and Stephanopoulos first met. While at Oxford, he had a serious girlfriend who worked in famine relief. Today, one of the people he admires most is a friend Alterman terms ''a saint" for his work in soup kitchens, homeless shelters, and the like. It is as if he surrounds himself with examples of the career he imagines he might have pursued were there not another stem demand on his future. His idol in public life, interestingly, is Bill Moyers, a former seminarian who also felt the lure of the White House, and who has made something of a career of sporting his ambivalence on his sleeve.

One reason for Stephanopoulos's repeated embrace of politics, clearly, is that it is a realm in which the motives of altruism and personal ambition are mutually reinforcing. Of course, it is also a realm in which altruism and personal ambition are easily confused, and one can camouflage the other.

Only Stephanopoulos knows precisely what balance of motives he brings to the job. But it is striking that while he is at least to some degree engaged by the moral content of government, he has been drawn to jobs that place him at one remove from that content: his role is to give advice that is first political, and secondarily a matter of good policy.

That Stephanopoulos's gifts steer him so insistently toward the worldly and pragmatic is a fact of life with which he has made uneasy armistice, a peace that seems constantly up for review.

As one of the first recruits to Clinton's campaign, in the amorphous role of deputy to a campaign manager who had not yet been hired, Stephanopoulos logged a lot of time with his new candidate. ''They spent hours talking; he bonded with Clinton early on, and fairly intensely," says Mark Miller, a Newsweek correspondent who, in the course of researching a book on the election, was allowed constant access to the campaign.

"He handles my baby like he's radioactive," says Begala. "He's a real bachelor.

The Rhodes scholarship may have been one key to fixing Stephanopoulos in Clinton's esteem. For many of those chosen—perhaps especially for those, like Bill Clinton, from modest backgrounds—the Rhodes is an important totem of identity, the ultimate credentialist shorthand in a meritocratic universe. It is no accident that the first Rhodes president employs a record number of Rhodes scholars.

In any case, the bond between Clinton and Stephanopoulos was clinched in the early primaries of '92, the darkest passages of the campaign, when first Gennifer Flowers and then Clinton's draft record threatened to bury his candidacy.

"At a certain level they have a simple trust," says Bob Boorstin, special assistant to the president for policy coordination. "And I think it's the kind of trust you get when people are lobbing hand grenades at you, and you're down there in the trench smelling each other's breath for six months."

"I think Clinton sees him as the ideal younger brother," says one person who worked closely with both men during the campaign. "As everything the real brother is not."

Stephanopoulos refuses any suggestion that he and the president have some "special, strange, familial bond, or whatever. ... I just hope he thinks I'm a very good, loyal staffer." Yet in all really important staff relationships, between a principal and the one or two aides who work most intimately with him, there is at least some quality of a marriage, some deep fit between psyches that answers needs on both sides.

Overtime, Stephanopoulos became what Richard Mintz calls "Clinton's political mirror." Clinton would sometimes call Stephanopoulos after midnight—even as late as two o'clock in the morning. Dutifully, Mintz would assure Clinton that Stephanopoulos wasn't asleep, and then go pound on his door to wake him up, so that Stephanopoulos could provide an ear for as long as Clinton needed to talk.

Recalls Newsweek's Miller, ' 'In the spring, during the primaries, Clinton was really difficult to be around—really bitter, really awful. A lot of times George would just listen, let him talk. '' Then and now, Stephanopoulos has been the man on whom Clinton can unleash what everyone agrees is a terrible temper. During the campaign, "the president would call and yell at him 10 times a day," according to one colleague. "He's always a target for Clinton when he's angry," says another.

His fine understanding of Clinton's moods made him the person through whom all Clinton's political advisers approached the candidate. Says Miller, "George has a unique ability—he's the only one other than Hillary—not to 'manipulate' him, but to press the right buttons to get the end result he wanted."

Stephanopoulos found an important ally in Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is said to appreciate his religious background—and who surely appreciates his effectiveness. He is one of the few aides who are close enough to address her as "Hillary." But he has also handled his relationship with her carefully, knowing, in the words of one campaign observer, that "if she didn't believe in George he wouldn't be there."

A simple reason for both Clintons' attachment to Stephanopoulos is the younger man's loyalty. Most political aides are constantly playing to two audiences: the boss and the larger political world—especially reporters—with whom they will still be doing business long after that boss has returned to Houston or Plains or Bel-Air. This audience they appeal to by describing, off the record, all their boss's flaws, and all his mistakes, and all the mistakes he would have made without the aid of wise counselors like themselves. Stephanopoulos doesn't play this game. In the rough first spring of Clinton's presidency, when other staffers were calling around to friends in the permanent power structure to agonize about whether their careers would ever recover from service in Clinton's White House, Stephanopoulos was defending his boss to the last ditch.

"The president trusts him," says one White House aide. "He trusts him implicitly. He knows that even though George may disagree on certain things, George is never going to do anything to fuck him."

Stephanopoulos's loyalty has been especially remarkable considering how poorly Clinton has sometimes reciprocated. As spokesman during the campaign, and damage-control artist today, Stephanopoulos has often had to defend Clinton without the benefit of knowing the full truth. A friend says that Stephanopoulos was "really exasperated," for example, at the way Clinton's explanations of his draft record kept shifting. The effort to "piece together what happened in the Clintons' complicated past . . . just exhausted him." Adds a Clinton campaign aide, "We never had all the facts, in all those episodes. We were always scrambling."

The explosion of political turmoil over the Clintons' investment in the Whitewater Development Company has posed eerily similar problems for the White House staffers—including Stephanopoulos—who were assigned to try to smother the brushfire. Only the Clintons knew the full story of their Arkansas finances, and the contents of records that their staffs pleaded with them to disclose. Even as they tried to stave off the appointment of a special counsel in early January, Clinton aides didn't know exactly what sins their blanket denials might apply to. Thus there was a certain irony in hearing a weary Stephanopoulos try to bat away the story as a familiar reprise of old charges—"deja vu all over again." For him, Whitewater must have a depressing familiarity indeed.

Friends say, though, that Stephanopoulos has made a clear-eyed peace with his boss's shortcomings. "He has no illusions about Bill Clinton's faults," says one. "I think he thinks of Clinton as enormously flawed. But that was something he kept pretty much to his closest friends in the campaign." One of the few times he showed anger in the inner circles of the campaign was during the early spring of '92, when the candidate was hurting his chances through his own flagging discipline. Watching Clinton eat too much, stay up too late, stress his weakened vocal cords, and step on his own message, Stephanopoulos—the boy who nearly starved himself down to 98 pounds as a senior in high school—was outraged.

But this contrast is, of course, what makes the two men such perfect complements: Stephanopoulos's steely discipline counters Clinton's compulsive lack of it, just as Clinton's boundless optimism balances the younger man's bleak pessimism. "Clinton wears his heart on his sleeve," says a White House staffer. "George wears his heart hidden under several layers of armor, really."

In the White House, Stephanopoulos has continued to be the person most effective at containing Clinton's undisciplined style. Clinton has established a structure in which the entire executive branch essentially reports to him. And when Stephanopoulos was trying to simultaneously advise the president, run the communications department, and serve as press secretary, no one was really assigned the role of backing Clinton up throughout his day. This was one reason for the govemment-by-crisis that seemed to dominate the first half of Clinton's first year.

In addition, Clinton tends to stay up late into the night, according to pollster Stan Greenberg, "either rethinking decisions that were made during the course of the day or secondguessing things, getting upset about things. So in the morning, George, I think, faces all that rethinking from dawn on." In other words, gentling the president toward resolution is an important part of Stephanopoulos's job.

Stephanopoulos acknowledges that Clinton's first year in office has been a steady series of peaks and valleys: acclaimed success at one moment, desperate trouble the next. "You get up a head of steam and then—oops! What's coming around the comer? I guess one of the things you learn, though, is that it's just another turn. And when you sort of deeply understand that, then you can get on and do your job."

Even factoring out the flattery that creeps into Washingtonians' descriptions of powerful colleagues, Stephanopoulos appears to be well liked inside the White House—in part because he has made so many other people's jobs mn more smoothly. But perhaps the best measure of his power is the fact that both Chief of Staff Thomas "Mack" McLarty and counselor David Gergen, amid their many praises of him, deliver subtle put-downs designed to minimize his personal relationship with the president.

"It's a professional relationship," emphasizes McLarty. "They did not know each other before the president announced—unlike in my case, who's known the president since kindergarten." And Gergen volunteers to discuss the way Clinton unleashes his temper on Stephanopoulos. "I think because it's probably more difficult for the president to vent at an older man—an old man like me," he adds jocularly.

Yet Stephanopoulos's advice often outweighs that of the other two on matters of substance. Advisers on both the domestic and the foreign-policy sides agree that the president rarely makes a major decision without soliciting Stephanopoulos's advice.

Colleagues agree that Stephanopoulos has pushed the more traditionally liberal side of this president's agenda: the earned-income tax credit, the plan for universal child immunizations, full funding for Head Start. He has constantly argued that deficit reduction should not take precedence over other Clinton goals—an argument that pits him against "deficit hawks" such as budget director Leon Panetta, his deputy, Alice Rivlin, and Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen.

But his chief job is to give political advice: This will fly; that will not. This is what will happen to your polls if you take that step. Do you or don't you have the votes in the House to pass this plan?

"George doesn't allow any false choices," says Greenberg. "George has a role of forcing a recognition of which goals are in conflict, and where there have to be trade-offs, and where priorities need to be made. I've seen him do it with brutal honesty."

Despite Stephanopoulos's liberalism, his advice tends to be—in a practical sense—conservative and risk-averse. For all his youth and hip new look, Stephanopoulos is deeply a product of his congressional background, above all a student of the impacted interest-group politics that drive the Hill. On the basis of his congressional sensitivities, for example, he advised from the start that an alcohol tax must not even be considered as a way to fund health care. He also advised Clinton against spending his political capital on the passage of nafta—which was considered a loser on the Hill until the final week before the vote.

''George's version of political reality is a skeptical, congressional, pessimistic one," says a White House colleague who faults Stephanopoulos's caution. ''On the Hill, every dream you've ever had has been tried and failed, at one point or another. Some look at that and accept it as an insurmountable obstacle, and others believe that political realities can be changed. That that's the president's job.

. . . [George's] political advice is shaped more by where Congress is than by where the American people are."

Perhaps the best example of Stephanopoulos's pragmatism is his role in brokering a compromise on Clinton's campaign promise to end the ban on gays in the military. Moving between gay groups, the Defense Department, congressional conservatives, and more sympathetic congressmen such as Representative Barney Frank, he sold Clinton on the "Don't ask, don't tell, don't pursue" policy that was finally adopted. Stephanopoulos's solution bowed to the fact that the government opponents of the change could inflict more political pain on the president than the gay groups he would disappoint.

Clinton aides disagree about whether this was a good solution in any but a political sense. There is no dispute, however, that Stephanopoulos is the man best able to make Clinton accept political reality. "Clinton has a wonderful, ineffable sense that he can accomplish all kinds of things, and accomplish them all at once," says a White House aide. "Everybody knows that Clinton doesn't like to say no. It's his great failing. It's what makes him a great politician, but it's his great flaw."

George, this aide continues, is the star at forcing Clinton to deal with "stuff Clinton knows but that he doesn't like to face."

This is the most important way in which Stephanopoulos is Clinton's perfect mirror. For it is here that Stephanopoulos's ace in the hole is his spiritual side—that hint of a finer nature somehow finding its way through a shark tank. On the one hand, Clinton is reflexively a man who acts as if compromise is a virtue in its own right. On the other hand, he always seems eager to believe that he has arrived not only at the doable deal but at the right solution. On the issue of gays in the military, several administration sources say, one of the things that sold Clinton on the compromise was the fact that Stephanopoulos—whom everyone knew to be at heart a supporter of overturning the ban altogether—described it as an honorable alternative.

Stephanopoulos is not the only person in Clinton's circle who serves to assure him that purity and pragmatism can be achieved simultaneously. It might be said that Hillary Clinton—the corporate lawyer with the do-gooder's drive, the shrewd tactician who also touts "the politics of meaning"—provides a similar assurance.

But in George Stephanopoulos, Clinton hired a package that is hard to find. The combination is brilliantly captured in The War Room. In one scene, late in the movie, Stephanopoulos is seen on the telephone with a caller who is threatening to publicize some new allegation of womanizing on Clinton's part. We see him kissing off the caller in a blizzard of arguments that mix contempt, blandishment, and thinly veiled threat. "People will think you're scummy," he tells his caller coldly. It is a moment of breathtaking political swagger. Only minutes later, he is seen on Election Day, talking to Paul Begala on the telephone, telling him, "Paulie ... as I was driving to work, I started to cry." And when the victorious Clinton calls him that night, to go over his acceptance speech, Stephanopoulos says the words that would be music to any politician's ears—but perhaps especially to Bill Clinton's. Thanking him for the opportunity to serve, Stephanopoulos says to the man he has just helped elect, "This was the best thing I ever did."

If that is what binds Clinton to Stephanopoulos, it's not hard to see what Stephanopoulos gets from the relationship: he gets to sit just a few yards from the most powerful office in the world. And while he would clearly have been happy to occupy a similar spot in the administration of Richard Gephardt or Bob Kerrey, it is possible that he gets something in the service of Bill Clinton that he would not have gotten from those others.

For if those contrasting segments of the movie represent two genuine parts of George Stephanopoulos, then he is, by definition, a man who lives with—who manages—a constant internal conflict. It is impossible to know at what depth of his being he wrestles with this tension: he's quite willing to talk about it—in fact, he insists on talking about it—but he does so in his most deeply guarded mode, spinning, spinning.

"The only way to resolve the problem of politics—which is that sometimes you have to do bad things for a good end, or that you have to get dirty hands—is that you have to know when to leave," explains George Stephanopoulos, who has only just arrived. "And that there have to be certain things that you're going to leave over; that you'll know that it's almost nonsustainable over the long haul.

"Now the question is, what is the long haul and how do you know when you're not doing what you thought you were supposed to be doing? I don't know, but you just have to keep asking the question."

It's a neat summary, entirely devoid of the messy human ambivalence that his family history, his friendships, his aspirations all point to. In the end, one can only guess at the satisfaction George Stephanopoulos may draw from his complicated usefulness to President Clinton: as he plies his great, God-given political skill every day on the president's behalf, he gets to know that, while he may be most valuable as his mother's child, he is also visible as his father's.