- 'Now I've come home at last,' exalted the world's most
boisterous hobo, arriving at his own party on Harlem's Adam Clayton Plaza,
named after a famous militant black politician. Bill Clinton may be from
a poor white family in rural Arkansas, and many of his guests this warm
summer evening were political wheeler-dealers from deep inside the Washington
Beltway, but the crowd that turned out to give Clinton a tumultuous welcome
the day he became a citizen of Harlem was black and proud of him. One man
even painted dreadlocks on the smiling photo- portrait - one of hundreds
- that were waved beneath a thicket of red, white and blue balloons.
-
- The Harlem Sax Seven played 'Stand By Me' and the crowd
even sang 'We Shall Overcome'. Clinton wiped his eyes. 'You were there
on the darkest days and the best days,' he told the multitude, some of
whom had waited since sunrise to see him. 'And I want to be a good neighbour
in Harlem on the best days and the dark days.' Within a few of the best
days, Clinton was doing a turn at an Aids benefit in the neighbouring Apollo
Theatre, on a stage once graced by Billie Holliday and Bessie Smith.
-
- If you hate Bill Clinton, this was the repellent sight
of him coming 'home' to the last place in America that would have him.
If you love Bill Clinton, this was the heartwarming proof that he really
is the people's President, in or out of office. Clinton may be founding
father of the 'Third Way' in politics, but when it comes to the man himself,
there is no middle ground.
-
- The party marked the official opening of Clinton's new
office at 55 W. 125th St - the penthouse of a nondescript building that
runs through the revitalised ghetto. The office is painted in creamy tones
with the help of the same interior designer who outfitted the home of hip-hop
impresario Sean 'P. Diddy' Combs, and is kitted out with oversized chairs
designed by Madonna's brother, Christopher Ciccone.
-
- But this was also the moment at which the man who coined
the notion of a 'permanent campaign' established a 'permanent Presidency'.
It was a confirmation that, after a curious exit from office marked by
both defiance and shame, the extraordinary Comeback Kid had come back yet
again.
-
- Small wonder, then, what Bill Clinton chose to wear (especially
for the cameras) during a recent lads' holiday jaunt with Anthony 'Hannibal'
Hopkins to Rio de Janeiro. Hopkins, white haired, donned a tropical shirt
and peered from behind sunglasses while the ever-buoyant Clinton carried
a football and sported a 'Harlem 125th St.' subway station T-shirt, while
the pair of old rogues checked out (and were checked out by) the local
girls from Ipanema.
-
- Clinton, not Hopkins, stole the show - but then, as the
jester at the court of Hollywood, Joe Eszterhas, wrote in his book about
Clinton: who could dream up a better drama than the Clinton presidency
and its supposedly scandalous slide into supposed disgrace? Answer: the
larger-than-life, now defiantly returned, Prodigal President Bill Clinton
himself.
-
- But the resurrected Bill Clinton is considerably more
than a character out of some West Wing II movie. Clinton is establishing
himself as a cogent, global political figure addressing the next generation
of supra-national priorities. Some of these involve learning from admitted
mistakes made during his presidency, such as failure to intervene in the
calamities of Rwanda and Bosnia. Others, like Clinton's present immersion
in the Aids crisis and questions of debt and poverty in the Third World
appear to demonstrate the Bill Clinton he wishes he could have been as
president - unfettered, more politically liberal than when he was, ironically,
restrained by power. Above all, Clinton is preparing to bare his teeth
a little over the backdrop to all contemporary politics: globalisation.
-
- Last Thursday one of the people closest to Clinton during
the second administration, Sidney Blumenthal, came out from the penumbra
in which he worked avidly as 'intermediary' in developing and communicating
the President's policies to deliver a lecture inaugurating the new term
for students at Bard University in New York. Blumenthal revealed Clinton
as a more impatient, radical reformer of the new economy.
-
- 'We don't see this as a conservative period, as Bush
does,' said Blumenthal. 'Clinton is getting together with political leaders
and has become engaged in the controversies over globalisation... Clinton
believed the protesters in Seattle did have something to say, that there
is an important debate throughout the whole world around these issues.'
Blumenthal said he thought Tony Blair, Clinton's friend and ally, 'would
have behaved a lot differently in Genoa if Clinton had been there. I think
the attitude taken in Genoa was the wrong approach, even by heads of state
I have a lot of respect for. This authoritarian and coercive approach is
wrong.'
-
- Of domestic policy, he said: 'I regard the Clinton agenda
as unfinished. I regard it as up to the progressive democrats of the future
to finish it.'
-
- With all this to propel him, Clinton - at 54, one of
the youngest ex-Presidents ever - has become a picture of boundless, restless
energy. Now you see him, now you don't. Hugging Nelson Mandela in Johannesburg,
cheering Andre Agassi at the French Open; then, voila! - he's at a beach
house party in Los Angeles playing snooker with Liz Hurley and chatting
up Sheryl Crow. Now he is being mobbed in Ireland, still the beloved peacemaker;
then at a Manhattan society soirÈe with Christie Brinkley, and suddenly
in the royal box at Wimbledon. 'It's called living,'said his friend and
former national security adviser Sandy Berger. 'That's the luxury of being
out of office.'
-
- It wasn't quite that simple. His was a Janus-faced departure
torn between defiance and shame. His last months had been similarly schizophrenic;
he appeared to alternate between a brooding melancholia and acceleration
of his unfinished political business, with sweeping decrees to protect
wilderness from speculation by business, and for trade union and patient
rights. He took to playing solitary golf in the rain, driving the ball
with frustrated, demonic accuracy; then lingered to chew the fat with reporters
on policy matters, long after the official press briefings had finished.
One minute, Clinton would be saying in a speech: 'In 200 years time, no
one will remember who any of us were'; the next, he would be working the
rope line down the last straggler, shaking the last hand like an addict
needing his fix of the adulation that 'permanent campaigning' brings, and
paying with nanoseconds of genuine affection.
-
- While Bush ascended to an office tainted by halted recounts
and a politicised Supreme Court, Clinton gave a speech vowing that America
had by no means heard the last of him. It was by far the best of the day
- a puckish breach of protocol, pregnant with political potential. Hillary
had meanwhile won the Senatorial election to represent New York, and the
couple prepared to establish the rival court of the presidency-in- exile
in Washington.
-
- But allegations of squalidity and dishonesty that had
marred a stubbornly popular presidency threatened to follow the Clintons
into political disgrace. A spin exercise by the new White House was quick
to feed gullible newspapers with rumours about a 'trashing' of the presidential
home by Clinton's outgoing team, and a 'theft' of gifts made to the institution
rather than the First Couple that amounted to looting. The first turned
out to be spurious, the second an exaggerated manipulation.
-
- More serious were scandals that broke over pardons granted
by the President on that last day in office. None for the American Indian
activist Leonard Peltier - whose challenge against a dodgy conviction had
become the cause of an entire people - but clemency generously bestowed
on what quickly emerged as a rogues' gallery. There was a clutch of shady
characters, including a heroin trafficker, for whom the First Couple's
embarrassing respective brothers, Roger Clinton and Hugh Rodham, had lobbied
(for money, of course). But most damaging was the odious figure of Marc
Rich.
-
- Rich was a fugitive living in a gated palace under the
protection of Swiss banking and extradition laws, wanted by the FBI for
fraud and other misdemeanors of the super-rich. Rich had played his part
in sanctions-busting to apartheid South Africa, the economic rape of post-Soviet
Russia and other similar commendations, while his Manhattan socialite former
wife pleaded his cause by throwing money at the Clintons and even gave
Bill a saxophone. It also emerged that Rich was a lavish benefactor to
charities in Israel with curious associations to the Mossad secret service,
and that his pardon - painstakingly negotiated with Clinton's friend Prime
Minister Ehud Barak after a bombardment of pleas from Jerusalem - was in
some way stitched into the Camp David peace agreement. The political connection
was sold to America as a mitigating circumstance for the pardon, and Houdini
Clinton escaped again.
-
- But only as far as the new family home in the sleepy
New York dormitory town of Chappaqua. 'It was a terrible 60 to 90 days',
said Terry McAuliffe, one of Clinton's closet confidants in the Democrat
Party (now chairman of the Democrat National Committee). 'A very difficult
time for him.' 'I've never had a period of my life when I didn't have a
good time,'said Clinton himself. 'What I miss most is my work, about having
influence on things I cared about'.
-
- Clinton had time on his hands. The man who once gridlocked
US cities at the head of presidential motorcades now moved around with
only two Secret Service agents, pulling up at stop signs like everyone
else. Clinton was often alone in the house while Hillary busied herself
in Washington. They had aimed to spend three nights a week together, but
her travel schedules made that impossible. Instead, Buddy the dog often
slept beside one of the world's most visibly libidinous men.
-
- Clinton got up and took breakfast with his valet, Oscar.
He read the Wall Street Journal and New York Times, in which he would have
seen a description of himself as 'adrift and isolated'. 'It must just kill
him to wake up, see a critical problem and not to be able to call Prime
Ministers and kings and queens to try and resolve it,' says his friend
Pete King, a New York Congressman. 'Ive never seen anyone who so has to
be in the centre of the action'.
-
- Clinton managed life's daily details clumsily. He had
difficulties with an ATM cash card. McAuliffe recalls Clinton dropping
off the line three times during a conversation while he fumbled to use
a portable phone. A basement flood badly damaged a rare book collection
Clinton treasured; his home insurer told him to get over it; basement floods
weren't covered.
-
- There was a humility and humanity to this new life. When
12- year-old twins Amanda and Jonathan Schwebel needed help with a school
project on the impact of technology on everyday life, they asked their
neighbour up the road for his take. The seventh-graders at Robert Bell
Middle School wrote Bill Clinton a note and next afternoon had received
a reply: yes, he was available. Within an hour, the twins were in the former
President's living room talking about mobile phones and Palm Pilots, which
Clinton found hard to operate. The President sat in a rocking chair for
this session. But he was never going to remain there for long. Clinton
had stopped still for the first moment in decades. He used that moment
to take a breath, get up and move on again.
-
- Sidney Blumenthal last week described what it was like
to work in the Clinton White House: 'It was like a 24-hour game of pick-
up basketball. Clinton would ask: "what do you think of this?"
- during a day in which he had asked the same question to 10 more people
and done the same thing on six other topics. You never knew when - he could
call you at midnight, any time. There's an inherent instability in the
psychology of a place like that, and it drove a lot of people crazy. I
happen to think it was a very positive and dynamic way to do things.'
-
- And, added Blumenthal: 'I don't think he can ever stop
being Bill Clinton. I think the President has not completely defined his
role; I don't think he'll have a formal role or seek office, like Secretary
General of the UN - these are fantasies - -he is going to be himself.'
-
- Clinton's rediscovery of himself this year began overseas.
His trip to India in April was a turning point - an echo of his historic
visit of March 2000, the first by a US President in 22 years, which brushed
aside decades of mutual distrust between the world's two largest electoral
democracies. This time, he headed for the area stricken by an earthquake
that had killed more than 20,000 people back in January and left a million
more homeless. This time, Oscar the valet laid roses on a muddy path where
156 children had been killed. Huge crowds chanted 'Cleen- ton, Cleen-ton',
and he promised he would keep returning to India for 'the rest of my life'.
His reason was interesting: 'I'm just trying to find something useful to
do in a place I care about.'
-
- Clinton's transglobal tour since then has been dazzling
- after a visit to Australia later this year (following the Middle and
Far East, again), he will have breezed through every continent except Antarctica,
and some 25 countries. Most cogent, arguably, was Ireland, where Clinton
remains a bittersweet symbol of a moment come and gone, a chance lost,
with his sax concert in Belfast and that unforgettable walk across the
'peace line', now violated by the firebombing of schoolchildren. In the
Republic, Clinton was hailed as hero and almost mobbed; Bono of U2 presented
himself as a big fan. In the North, eggs thrown by Protestant extremists
not only missed, they entrenched his standing. In South Africa, Clinton
was greeted by Nelson Mandela as a partner on the same road, brother almost,
if not equal.
-
- There is also a domestic dimension to Clinton's political
comeback. Mark Penn, his former White House pollster, published a survey
recently, demonstrating that 48 per cent of voters would be more comfortable
with Clinton as President, compared with 36 per cent for Bush. 'That's
evidence,' says Penn, 'that they're putting everything in perspective.'
Clinton's social circle has changed little since he was President: he passes
time with Blumenthal, McAuliffe, former campaign strategist James Carville
and former aides Erskine Bowles, Douglas Sosnik, John Podesta and Cheryl
Mills - all of whom are busy busily plotting the next, post-presidential
Clinton strategy.
-
- 'The issues that animated his presidency are still the
ones he wants to work on and make a contribution to,' Podesta said. 'He
wants to leave footprints.' Representative Adam Schiff of California said
Clinton invited him and a small group of colleagues to breakfast at his
Washington home last month and held forth on current issues. 'He's one
of the most brilliant strategists our party's ever had,' Schiff said, adding
that he was reminded of how Clinton is out of power at an age when most
people are just ascending to it. 'It presents an almost unprecedented dilemma
of what you do as a former President.'
-
- Bill Clinton is politically dangerous to his ideological
opponents again because he is doing what he does best, therefore enjoying
life again. Citizen Clinton is happy to hop onto a shuttle plane when he
goes to Washington. Internationally, he travels on commercial flights,
often holding ad-hoc seminars with fellow passengers in first class, much
as he did in the Oval Office. In the airport, he will lecture his entourage
on the merits or demerits of Burger King and 'Au Bon Pain'.
-
- Jennifer Palmieri, a former White House aide who has
travelled abroad with Clinton, says he now realises when staff members
rib him with mocking comments. As President, she recalls, he was usually
too absorbed in other thoughts to notice. 'I have seen the person that
he probably was before he became President - basically a normal person,'
she says.
-
- Not all Clinton's globetrotting, not every burst of rhetoric,
is motivated by political crusading and living in the moment. Quite the
reverse - much of it has been a brazen commercial operation, as Clinton
hit the lecture and after-dinner speaking circuit like a rock star possessed.
This is what the former editor of the New Republic, Andrew Sullivan calls
the 'hugely busy, strangely empty life he now leads'. This is the Clinton
who dislikes - even fears - silence or solitude, and has to keep moving
to stay upright, like a cyclist.
-
- When Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr made similar tours,
the luxury hotels in which they spoke were sealed from the public. Clinton,
by contrast, revelled in his greeting by a saxophone band in Germany playing
Presley's 'Don't Be Cruel'. In Copenhagen, he attracted large crowds by
taking a jaunt in search of a good coffee shop. Clinton's affable global
walkabout only adds to his commodity value. His engagements (along with
those of Henry Kissinger) are booked by the Harry Walker Agency, whose
president, Don Walker, says: 'Clinton is the most sought-after speaker
ever on the lecture circuit.' Although his spokeswoman, Julia Payne, insists
that most of his engements are unpaid, Clinton knows his words can be exchanged
for cash (he has refused more than 2,000 interview requests since leaving
office). He became known as 'Dollar Bill' for the fees he charged - starting
at $100,000 at home and more overseas. He told the Norwegians that fatherhood
was the most important part of his life, and how he had helped Chelsea,
who starts at Oxford next week, with her maths homework until the sums
became too hard for him. Next day he went to Stockholm and said much the
same thing, then to Vienna, then Warsaw - where someone threw an egg at
him.
-
- In Britain, Clinton hit fundraising overdrive, with the
poor Fabian Society cancelled after being faced, and beaten, by the invoice.
Celebrities, actors, authors, computer executives, editors and public figures
with fatter wallets than the Fabians forked out vast sums to drink Bollinger
at tables near Clinton and line up to shake his hand in Dublin, Oxford
and Hay-on-Wye.
-
- But quite apart from Clinton's political mission and
his addiction to public life and popular adulation, there is a time- honoured
reason for this frantic touring: debt. Clinton may have won the propaganda
battle over prosecutor Kenneth Starr's prying investigation and failed
impeachment, but the legacy of that struggle is that the Clintons still
owe nearly $4 million (out of more than $15m) in legal fees. In addition,
there are weighty mortgages on the multimillion-dollar homes in New York
and Washington.
-
- Private fundraising, a pension of $166,000 and other
allowances bringing the annual pay packet to $992,000 should help. But
most of all - and most eagerly awaited of all - is 'The Book' for which
Clinton signed an all-time record contract of $10m with Knopf last month,
beating Pope John Paul by $1.5m and his own wife Hillary by $2m.
-
- 'President Clinton,' said Knopf editor-in-chief Sonny
Mehta who dealt out the advance, 'is one of the dominant figures on the
global stage. He has lived an extraordinary life, and he has a great story
to tell. His memoir, one of the most widely anticipated books in memory,
will be a thorough and candid telling of his life.'
-
- How candid? Roger Straus, Mehta's opposite number at
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, wonders whether his rivals will earn back
their investment in Dollar Bill, but adds: 'There is a book that Clinton
could write that might sell. But anyone who knows Mr Clinton doesn't think
he will write it.'
-
- Maureen Dowd, veteran columnist for the New York Times,
says that a copy of the proposal Clinton submitted to Knopf was 'leaked
to me,'and offered a 'tantalising glimpse' of what he 'intends to divulge'.
Dowd then reproduces a sneak preview from a chapter entitled: 'How a Man
Gets What He Really Wants'. The fragment: 'We were an unlikely couple,
I know. Our folie a deux in the crazy season of the budget impasse probably
raised eyebrows. But sometimes people who seem to have very little in common
can discover that they have a lot in common. Who cares that I was the President?
I was also a man, and I had needs, and my guest had needs, and we could
understand each other. Over a pepperoni and cheese extra-thick crust, we
could unwind and relate to each other's inner child, sharing the journey
from pudgy kid in a problem home to working to make the country a better
place. So there we were, just a couple of misunderstood people with good
hair and a gnawing desire for attention and love and respect. Of course,
I knew I was being manipulative, but I wanted what I wanted. Seduction
is my skill. It gives me pleasure to conquer people, to cause them to melt.'
-
- Who is the mystery guest? 'Clinton [and his lawyer] were
wise to omit to mention the name of the overemotional, overweight and melting
object of Mr. Clinton's seduction,' says Dowd. No it was not an intern,
it was his arch-enemy on Capitol Hill, the rightwing Republican leader
and House Speaker, Newt Gingrich.
-
- http://www.observer.co.uk/review/story/0,6903,548703,00.html
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