Posted on 03/31/2002 9:11:51 AM PST by Bubba_Leroy
Living well is at least some revenge. Tuesday he had lunch alone with Willie Mays at the Harlem office. Wednesday it was Robin Williams and Billy Crystal at a midtown restaurant, interrupted by a polite greeting from another diner, George Stephanopoulos, the first time the two had seen each other since the former White House aide savaged his old boss in a book. By Easter he was off to Oscar de la Renta’s spread in the Dominican Republic for vacation with Hillary, Chelsea and Ian Klaus, Chelsea’s Rhodes-scholar boyfriend.
THEN IT’S EIGHT American cities in the next three weeks. Plus a hop over to Austria somewhere in between.
That’s positively sedentary for private citizen Bill Clinton, who has yakked his way through nearly 200 speeches in 30 countries since leaving office 14 months ago, an average of almost one every other day, not counting all the times he holds court—sometimes endlessly—with practically anyone he meets. The talk and travel is its own kind of therapy. He’s visited six of the world’s seven continents at least twice, and would stump across Antarctica if the penguins anted up.
The man’s still a radioactive isotope for millions, so here’s a little speculative math to drive the Clinton haters nuts: overseas gigs pull in $200,000 to $300,000 a pop (far short of the $2 million Ronald Reagan received for a visit to Japan in 1989, but Reagan rarely traveled); American conferences and banquets yield at least $125,000, and bookings continue to be strong for the foreseeable future. Clinton’s Harlem staff estimates that 40 percent of his speeches are for pay, which would put Clinton’s annual speaking income at somewhere between $10 million and $15 million, all but erasing his roughly $5 million in legal bills. With his $12 million book deal, the largest in world history, the only impeached president of the 20th century will gross about $40 million in his first couple of years out of office.
This is rock-and-roll tour money. The organizers of one British event last year had to inquire of the tax office whether Clinton was properly classified as a “statesman” or “entertainer,” the latter requiring a 22 percent tax on the speaking fee. After careful deliberation, the tax collectors declared him still a statesman, a decision that might prove more controversial with some of their American cousins.
But star power can’t bring back real power. Another trip to Africa—the only continent where the former president doesn’t charge for his services—was postponed in late March because the leaders Clinton was supposed to meet there to discuss AIDS and his foundation’s development projects stood him up when they decided to attend a big poverty conference in Monterrey, Mexico, the same week. The Africans wanted a chance to meet President Bush instead.
After ending all talk of being overshadowed, Bush is the alpha male now. But the incumbent can’t possibly match his predecessor as a figure of fascination. While he labors intermittently on his memoirs, Clinton remains his own first edition of talent and disgrace. At 55, he’s the youngest, most kinetic and intellectually alive ex-president since Teddy Roosevelt. Bitter and hopeful; the spleen and the heart. For Clinton there must always be a sequel, some testament to his boundless resiliency, some proof that even when his book is done, the story remains unfinished.
He landed hard in early 2001 after a seamy exit from office, alone in the suburbs with his dog, Buddy, and valet, Oscar, angry as hell. Words like “shocking,” “tacky” and “inexcusable” were used, and those were his friends talking. Even now, Clinton cannot admit the obvious point that the Marc Rich pardon was simply wrong, insisting heatedly in his first sit-down interview about life after the presidency that he “got mugged on the way out the door.”
But in recent months the rage and loneliness seem to be ebbing, his mood lifted by his fawning reception, especially abroad, and by a sense that he can still leverage his fame to do some good. Even when he’s heckled, he turns it around with a transparently Clintonesque gesture, telling an Australian technology conference to “give [the heckler] a hand for speaking his mind,” as the miscreant is hustled from the room.
“I’ve got to let a lot of it go,” he exhales with a shrug. But of course he can’t. What’s different about him is a new willingness to give outsiders a glimpse of that tussle inside him. During his presidency, his on-the-record interviews were rehearsed beforehand with aides, and he was usually disciplined about staying on message. Now he’s less defensive about being defensive. Willfully chipper, perhaps, barely hiding his hurt; but looser and less bottled up.
Clinton’s not tormented, but he does seem conflicted. A torrent of rationalizations—some legit, some lame—spill out of him in monologues, especially on pardons and terrorism. Then, just when he’s getting redder in the face, he counts his blessings, finds his inner optimism and pulls back. “I think being angry or resentful is totally destructive,” he says, shortly after showing flashes of anger and resentment.
Of course the news last month that the eight-year, $73 million Whitewater investigation—which eventually led to impeachment—turned up no evidence of criminal wrongdoing by the Clintons confirmed all over again his contempt for prosecutors and the press (which, typically, buried the exonerating story after hyping the charges for years). Clinton hasn’t the slightest doubt that he’s the victim of a GOP attack machine that announced on Capitol Hill its intention to impeach him long before he gave them the Monica Lewinsky story to exploit.
“We live in an historical period when the fanaticism of America is on the right, and it has an apparatus to support it,” he says, echoing his wife’s 1998 argument about a “vast right-wing conspiracy.” His enemies “felt entitled to rule,” to deny his legitimacy as president from day one and sully every part of his record, even after he left office. “They think about me apparently a lot more than I think about them now,” he insists with a dismissive wave of the hand, which, considering the intensity of his expression, might not be strictly true. “One night last year he called about 1 a.m. ranting and raving about something,” says Julia Payne, his spokesperson. “And I said, ‘Sir, are you watching Fox again?’ ”
Often the smile and the knife are delivered as one. Last week Clinton was chuckling over the fact that his first post-presidential interview is going to NEWSWEEK, a magazine he calls “the house organ of Paula Jones.” Then, out of nowhere, Clinton the Score Keeper made a cryptic reference to the obscure case of an anti-Castro terrorist named Orlando Bosch, who blew up an airliner in 1976, killing 73, and was freed from jail in 1990 by the then President Bush under pressure from his son Jeb and Cuban exiles. “I swore I wouldn’t answer questions about Marc Rich until [former president] Bush answered about Orlando Bosch,” he says with a forced grin. But he did, admitting for the first time that his hard feelings toward prosecutors in his own case played a role in the Rich decision.
With notable exceptions, Clinton isn’t a grudge holder. Of course if he were, he wouldn’t have many people to talk to. His usual pattern is to vent, wallow and then move on. (Hillary is less forgiving.) Even the cold relationship with Al Gore thawed on Sept. 13, when Clinton waited up until 3 in the morning for Gore, grounded by the crisis, to arrive in Chappaqua from Buffalo by car. They talked until dawn, and have stayed in occasional touch.
There’s a wistful and amused lilt to his conversation. Peering south toward Central Park from his office on 125th Street, Clinton told his old friend Vernon Jordan: “Who would have guessed when we met 30 years ago that you’d end up with an office in midtown and I’d have one in Harlem?” The gossip items and tabloid nostalgia trips are almost a joke to him now. “Tonya Harding looks like a pretty tough cookie to me.” He chuckled after I asked him about the figure skater’s boxing match with Paula Jones.
It’s not a bad life, and he knows it. He golfs with Jack Nicholson and Chevy Chase; dodges a flasher on a balcony in Paris (“Whatever you do, don’t look!” James Carville told him as he shook hands below); hangs with Chris Tucker, who is researching a movie about a black president, at the Voodoo Lounge in L.A. (“He’s like a 30-year-old black man,” says Tucker, “and worse than Puffy with the two-way” pager); shops for bikinis and sarongs (for Chelsea, he says) with Anthony Hopkins in Brazil. Hot Internet rumors—that he had Mohamed Atta released from an Israeli jail or hosted Kenneth Lay in the Lincoln Bedroom—are false. So are most of the tabloid stories, but it’s hard to know which ones. He long ago lost the benefit of the doubt.
The ex-president is thick-skinned about tabloids but hair-trigger sensitive when it comes to his record, especially on terrorism. He has dominated more than one social gathering with descriptions of how his team tried repeatedly to kill Osama bin Laden, foiled at least a half-dozen terrorist attacks in the United States and more than tripled the antiterrorism budget of the FBI and other agencies. He reminds his listeners, some of whom wander off to bed before he has finished holding forth, that the GOP blocked his anti-money-laundering legislation (aimed at Al Qaeda), not to mention stopping his efforts to rein in the book-cooking accountants later responsible for Enron.
All the talking and traveling is apparently good for Clinton’s mental health, easing the transition from the frenzy of the presidency. But the trips are different for him now. “He’s able to meet new people, which he loves, in much more relaxed settings,” says his wife. “He gets to visit tourist sites he never had time for.” Her Senate career is also a plus, providing him with what one close friend calls a “healthy pipeline to the action,” though she says “he’s plenty plugged in” anyway. After Hillary was reduced to tears by booing firefighters at Paul McCartney’s Madison Square Garden event to honor the victims of September 11, Clinton was angry and protective. And in his own speech, he gave the senator a valuable political lesson in how to tame an unfriendly crowd: produce something the audience can cheer, in this case the bracelet of a fallen hero.
“My general sense is that he’s not having as hard a time as people thought he would have,” says the Rev. Tony Campolo, one of the “pastoral counselors” Clinton arranged to talk to regularly after the Lewinsky story broke in 1998, instead of seeking therapy. “He stays intensely busy. He’s on the road. That has a way of keeping him distracted from the existential situation.”
When he’s not traveling (about half the time), Clinton stays in Chappaqua and rides 45 minutes to his Harlem office in a black SUV driven by the Secret Service, always returning at night to the “old farmhouse,” he says, even after a late event in the city. He’s still a night owl, completing paperwork (or calling friends) until 1:30 a.m. some nights and sleeping as late as 9 a.m. Senator Clinton lives at their house on Embassy Row in Washington during the week, but she’s often back in New York state seeing constituents. They try to arrange their schedules to overlap for three-day weekends in Chappaqua, and roughly twice a month when the former president takes the US Airways shuttle to Washington, where he plays golf as a congressional spouse at the Army Navy Club and keeps a low profile. (His other domestic flights are usually on corporate jets paid for by those inviting him to speak.)
Fathoming the truth about the Clinton marriage remains impossible, but he has told New York friends that unlike the 18th-century bond between John and Abigail Adams depicted in David McCullough’s best seller, “distance does not make the heart grow fonder” in any marriage nowadays. So they both say they work hard to carve out time together, schedules permitting. Of course he’ll take any excuse to go to England to visit Chelsea, who is studying at Oxford and is now fair game for Fleet Street. “He’s very committed to seeing his family life succeed,” Campolo says. “Any rumors of affairs are erroneous.”
And yet the ex-president’s existential predicament remains. What to do? Where to focus? How to channel the legendary energies and appetites? To the extent that Clinton has identified the priorities of his ex-presidency, they are roughly as follows: make money for his family’s future, so that “if I drop dead, my wife can continue in public service and my daughter will be all right”; make progress on his book and on building his presidential library in Little Rock (which he visits once a month); make a difference on “nation building” (his term) issues like economic empowerment, conflict resolution and community service.
In the United States, many of his nonpaying appearances are connected to promoting the initiatives of his presidency. Last week, for instance, he went to a book party for Sarah Brady, who worked with him pushing gun control. And he hastily arranged a Harlem event to broadcast word that roughly 5 million working people have as much as $5,000 a year in unclaimed money coming to them thanks to the Clinton-era expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit (“We should have changed the boring name,” he says with frustration). Sensitive to the charge that the good times were not his doing, he was cheered by U.S. Census figures showing that while the Reagan boom lifted 50,000 children out of poverty, the Clinton boom did the same for 4.1 million.
Overseas, Clinton still has his fingers in foreign policy. While in Jidda, Saudi Arabia, for a February speech, he met for more than three hours with Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah to discuss what is now known as the Saudi plan to restart the peace process (before The New York Times’s Tom Friedman did). Privately dissed for months by the White House for his failed Mideast peace efforts in 2000, Clinton’s extraordinary knowledge of the region and commitment to keeping the parties talking is suddenly looking good. The ex-president praises envoy Anthony Zinni, and he’s not agitating for a formal diplomatic role, but he joked privately late last year that Bush “could just send me and George [Mitchell] over there, and when it fails, he can blame us!”
That’s unlikely, but the White House may be starting to realize he’s a tremendous resource in other regions, too. In the meantime, he works his buddy list of heads of state and “formers,” staying in close touch with friends like British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien and Nelson Mandela, whom he credits with helping him move past old recriminations. He has declined to criticize Bush on domestic policy and stayed strongly supportive of the war against terrorism, usually sticking to the informal speak-no-evil rules of the ex-presidents’ club.
But for the first time Clinton is now willing to disagree publicly with Bush’s policy toward North Korea. “We ended their nuclear program in ’94, and we nearly came to blows. It was about as close as we came to all-out war when I was president,” Clinton says. “We kept it quiet because I didn’t want to scare anybody. But I knew I couldn’t afford to let North Korea develop nuclear weapons.” Now, he says, Bush must reverse course and resume talks with North Korea to end its missile program, as favored by South Korean President Kim Dae Jong. But Clinton still stops short of criticizing Bush’s “axis of evil” speech.
Even now, every day’s newspaper seems to bring a reminder that Clinton’s past has not passed. Bush repudiated comments by his spokesman, Ari Fleischer, blaming the violence in the Mideast on Clinton’s pushing too hard at Camp David (which Clinton terms “laughable”). But the president said nothing when Vice President Cheney, at a GOP fund-raiser last month, quoted favorably from a column by former Clinton aide Dick Morris in The Wall Street Journal claiming Clinton didn’t care about terrorism. Some members of Congress still echo Bush’s 2000 Campaign charge that Clinton “hollowed out” today’s military—the same military (built and trained in the Clinton years) that has performed so well in the war against terrorism. All are reminders of how handy Clinton remains as a punching bag.
While Clinton is usually factually correct in refuting these arguments, he can’t help sounding defensive and self-absorbed. And he’s hardly about to join the reigning Washington consensus, even among many Democrats, which is that if Clinton’s skillful stewardship to a post-industrial economy was right for the 1990s, Bush’s unadorned moral clarity worked better after September 11.
Clinton’s policy fluency—and unmatched ability to explain a complex world—are already missed in some quarters. But he still must confront the perception that he’s a little “September 10th.” Not a relic; too young and forward-thinking for that, but less relevant than he once seemed. He’s at historical risk of being remembered as a gaudy flower—or tiresome weed—obscured between the Bushes, a prewar luxury of tabloid distraction.
Not surprisingly, Clinton begs to differ. While he knows that having sex with an intern and lying about it tarnished his presidency forever (“The biggest wounds in life are all self-inflicted,” he says ruefully), he’ll be damned if he lets that wreck everything he touched. He comforts himself that he had his shot during an important transitional time in world history, served longer than any Democratic president since Franklin D. Roosevelt and amassed plenty of accomplishments that will stand up to historical scrutiny, if only people could be persuaded to focus on them.
September 11 rendered that even harder. After the attacks, he set about doing something positive—working with Bob Dole to raise $100 million to help put the children of victims through college. But Clinton made no secret of his frustration over missing the biggest presidential leadership challenge of his generation. “It was painful for him,” says one person who saw him last fall. “He has prepared all of his life for something truly big like this.” Now the ex-president is contesting even that, insisting that the war on terrorism, while important, “is not like World War II at all” and will eventually be seen in the context not of the Bush presidency but of Clinton’s global achievements.
This is the Clinton who infuriates people, but they better learn to live with it. Anyone hoping he’ll just fade away for good, like John Wayne Bobbitt or a busted dot-com, is bound to be disappointed. By law, he cannot try, as Teddy Roosevelt did, to return to the White House (except in 2008 or 2012 as a spouse), and he says he’s not interested in being mayor of New York or holding any other public office. But the greatest natural candidate of our time has already begun to run anyway, a campaign of the past (to make his humiliating impeachment an ever-smaller part of his legacy) and of the future (to be an effective ex-president). He’s trailing Jimmy Carter badly in the latter contest, but it’s early yet. At this point in his ex-presidency, Carter was holed up in Plains, Ga., writing his memoirs, rarely venturing into town, much less across the world.
Like a prime-time hit now in syndication, the Clinton show today is less visible but more profitable. After a lecture-date dry spell in the United States because of the pardons (foreign bookings were unaffected), Clinton’s speaking schedule filled up quickly. His incisive tour of global challenges is a winner with audiences. Clinton’s lawyer Bob Barnett says he has a file with $100 million in promotional offers in it. Game shows in Italy and England are looking for a host, and NBC’s “The West Wing” offered a guest appearance. None has been accepted. And the rumors of Hollywood deals are false.
Clinton’s legal travails are not entirely behind him. A New York grand jury is hearing evidence on the pardons, and in February a House subcommittee headed by Rep. Doug Ose recommended a Justice Department investigation of $400,000 in gifts the Clintons received as they left office.
The gift rap still angers former Clinton aides, who note that the “scandal” was mostly about a few items being mislabeled by White House personnel. The china registry set up by Clinton friends at an Omaha department store was a bit gauche, they concede, but they add that barely a peep was raised when friends bought Ronald and Nancy Reagan a house in California and gave George and Barbara Bush more than $100,000 in gifts, more evidence of what Clinton calls a “double standard.” The supposed trashing of Air Force One in Clinton’s final days (fanned by the Bushies) was simply untrue.
No one—including his wife—knows what Clinton will cop to in his book, due in the fall of 2003. He has 80 hours of contemporaneous White House audiotapes he secretly made with Taylor Branch, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author. (They were vetted by Kenneth Starr’s office.) But former aides are worried about the absence of other sources of anecdotal information. For fear of subpoenas, the Clinton administration had no exit interviews or oral-history projects. “I’d be sitting in an important meeting, the president would be making a great point and I’d notice, ‘Gee, I’m not taking notes and neither is anyone else’,” recalls one top aide.
To refresh his memory, the ex-president hired Ted Widmer, a professor and former White House speechwriter, to interview him on what are called “book-talking days.” Clinton usually follows these with “book-writing days,” where he writes in longhand, usually in Chappaqua. While he says he’ll probably write 1,200 pages and cut it in half, nothing has been turned in yet to Robert Gottlieb, his editor at Knopf, and longtime Clinton associates fear that, as one says, “the process is going to be what all Clinton writing projects are—a train wreck.”
But when it appears, Clinton will hawk the hell out of it all over the world. And Barnett came up with a novel marketing idea: extra chapters for foreign editions. So the Spanish-language version, for instance, will feature an extra section on the Clinton-led bailout of the Mexican economy, the European edition will include additional material on Bosnia and Northern Ireland, and the Middle Eastern version will detail more of the peace talks. Knowing Clinton, the joke goes, he’ll write one version for the Arabs, and another for the Israelis.
Clinton is still a formidable if crass fund-raiser. Just 24 hours after having lunch with the ex-president, one wealthy donor was hit up by an aide asking for a library donation. Insulted, he refused. Even so, Clinton continues to be the major strategist in his party—the self-described “not-so-elder elder statesman.” But wary of making himself a target, he prefers lashing the GOP in private. It’s one thing to point across a Manhattan party, as he did last month, and say, “That bartender’s Social Security shouldn’t be sacrificed to cut my taxes”; another to attack a president far more popular than he was at his peak.
But even if he won’t lead the Democrats’ charge, Clinton spends hours on the phone with 2004 presidential hopefuls. And he’ll stump this fall for Democrats, including several who worked for him—if they think it will help. Some, like former chief of staff Erskine Bowles, who is running for the Senate in conservative North Carolina, don’t want Clinton’s help; others, like former Labor secretary Robert Reich, who torched his 30-year friendship with Clinton with a critical book, likely won’t get it.
After the buckraking and the memoirs, Clinton says he wants to do some serious good in the world. “I hope within five years to be in public service full time,” he says. Already, Clinton has helped establish a City Year program (the forerunner to AmeriCorps) in South Africa. And he’s popularizing the provocative ideas of Brazilian economist Hernando de Soto, who argues that poor people worldwide are sitting on hundreds of billions of dollars in assets (mostly in the land they squatted on) that with some well-placed legal reform can be turned into collateral, unlocking immense new development capital.
Right now, these projects are unfocused. Last fall Clinton brought in Maggie Williams, chief of staff to Hillary Clinton in the White House, to whip the 14-person Harlem office and its leader into shape. Williams, who also gives Hillary another line into her husband’s business, says the greatest asset Clinton brings to his ex-presidency is what she calls “convening power.” That’s “the power to say, ‘OK, who are the 10 people in the world who can get this thing done?’ Then more than likely, Bill Clinton can get them to the table.”
While he waits for it all to cohere, he talks, travels and inhales books, recently enjoying two revisionist biographies by Geoffrey Perret, one that says Ulysses S. Grant was a much cleaner president than is believed, and the other a sympathetic treatment of John F. Kennedy’s psyche. Last week it was “Revenge,” a new book by Laura Blumenfeld, a Washington Post reporter who tracks down the Palestinian who shot and slightly wounded her father. In the end, Blumenfeld learns to contain her thirst for revenge and make something positive of it. The subtitle is “A Story of Hope.” Clinton called Blumenfeld to tell her he loved the book.
For brain-dead liberals, maybe. Personally, the less I hear about Clinton, the happier I am.
Yeah...Sure..Riiiiiiiighhhhhhhhhhhttt!.
Widdle Hillary just curled up like a wounded widdle bunnie rabbit after they booed her. Uh huh.
More like she started spewing "Fuc*ing Joo Basta%s!" at the producers of the fundraiser is more like it.
Reagan didn't need the money. He had already earned plenty on his own merits and abilities before he ever assumed public office. Clinton, on the other hand, never made a real living. All of his money has been earned through politics and shady book deals, etc.
Now that's revolting. Absolutely true, but revolting.
This should be all over Fox News tomorrow.
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