According to your pal Christopher Hitchens, it went a little differently.
>From "No One Left To Lie To: The Values of the Worst Family," pagea 27-28:
My second anecdote concerns a moment in the White House, which was innocently related to me by George Stephanopolous. It took place shortly after the State of the Union speech in 1996 when the president, having already apologized to the "business community" for burdening it with too much penal taxation, had gone further and declared that "the era of big government is over." There was every reason, in the White House at that stage, to adopt such a "triangulation" position and thereby deprive the Republicans of an old electoral mantra. But Stephanopolous, prompted by electoral considerations as much as by any nostalgia for the despised New Deal, proposed a rider to the statement. Ought we not to add, he ventured, that we do not propose a policy of "Every Man For Himself"? To this, Ann Lewis, Clinton's director of communications, at once riposted scornfully that she could not approve any presidential utterance that used "man" to mean mankind. Ms. Lewis, the sister of Congressman Barney Frank and a loudly self-proclaimed feminist in her own right, was later to swallow, or better say retract, many of her own brave words about how "sex is sex," small print or no small print, and to come out forthrightly for the libidinous autonomy (and of course, "privacy") of the Big Banana. And thus we have the introduction of another theme that is critical to our story. *At all times, Clinton's retreat from egalitartian or even from "progressive" positions has been hedged by a bodyguard of political correctness.* (italic in original)