Bill Clinton

by Michael Tomasky

  Clinton’s Republican predecessor George H. W. Bush had accepted the science and instructed the Environmental Protection Agency to pursue solutions; Clinton did the same, appointing solid environmentalists to key positions. But when the Gingrich Congress came in, the Republicans swerved hard to the right on these issues; the “job-destroying” EPA occupied a place of prominence on the new right’s enemies list. Many of Clinton’s actions on behalf of the environment took the form of staving off attempts by Republicans to weaken regulations or gut the Endangered Species Act. There were times, however, when Clinton directly angered environmentalists, as when he signed an appropriations bill in 1995 that allowed for so-called salvage logging of trees killed either by insects or in a wildfire in a way that permitted logging companies to step around the normal rules and processes. The Republicans had pushed for this measure in the wake of the previous year’s rampant wildfires in the West. Bruce Babbitt, Clinton’s secretary of the interior, toed the line publicly but privately was said to believe the White House “gave away the store” when it agreed to the salvage rider. Both Clinton and Vice President Gore, the administration’s greenie-in-residence, later admitted the rider was a mistake.

  Now, though, Clinton set off on a veritable conservation spree. In his last two years in office he placed vast parcels of land under federal protection. In January 2000, it was a million acres around the Grand Canyon and islands off the California coast; in May, an initiative to protect coasts and coral reefs; and, just two weeks before leaving office, sixty million acres of national forest. Clinton relied on the 1906 Antiquities Act as his authority for much of this activity, and in the end he was said to have “set aside more acreage under the Act than Theodore Roosevelt,” widely considered America’s greatest environmentalist president.

  But the core focus of Clinton’s final year in office was the Middle East. President Carter had secured peace between Israel and Egypt in 1978. In 1994, Clinton had helped orchestrate a historic peace treaty between Israel and Jordan, which had controlled the West Bank prior to the 1967 war. But peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians themselves, with so many vexing issues that struck so deep inside both people’s identities and histories and that seemed so hopelessly insoluble, had eluded every president who’d tried.

  The new Israeli prime minister, Ehud Barak, was a highly decorated army officer who had once dressed as a woman in an undercover operation in Beirut to kill Palestinians who were deemed to have had Israeli blood on their hands. Now he clearly wanted to go down in history as the man who ended the tensions. He wanted peace not just with the Palestinians but also with Lebanon, which had been officially at war with Israel since the latter’s formation in 1948, and with Syria, from which Israel had taken the Golan Heights in 1967. In 1999, Barak began pushing Clinton to start the process with Syria. And so in January 2000, Clinton gathered the two parties together in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, a hamlet up in the hills a little more than an hour’s drive northwest of Washington. Barak came ready to deal, and the Syrians, under President Hafez al-Assad, responded in kind. But when the moment of truth came, Barak blinked, perhaps fearful of a backlash at home. The parties, and the president, walked away empty-handed. A few months later, when Clinton tried to reignite the talks, Assad was in failing health and no longer interested. A major opportunity was missed to show the region, and the world, that these historic enemies could make peace.

  Clinton pressed on. On July 11, 2000, at Camp David, he opened direct talks between the Israelis and the Palestinians. Again, Barak had pushed for the summit; Arafat had been more ambivalent. A few days into the meeting, Israel made significant moves on the status of Jerusalem and on the amount of occupied territory it would yield to a new Palestinian state. Arafat didn’t budge for a while, but he finally produced a letter that “seemed to say,” as Clinton put it in My Life, “that if he was satisfied with the Jerusalem question, I could make the final call on how much land the Israelis kept for settlements and what constituted a fair land swap.”

  On the seventh day, Barak choked on a peanut and stopped breathing for nearly forty seconds before getting a Heimlich from someone and gathering himself. That night, or, in fact, in the wee hours of the next morning, he gave Clinton permission to see if he could work out a deal with Arafat on Jerusalem and the settlements. The next day, Clinton presented Arafat with a plan that included many Israeli concessions but not full Palestinian sovereignty over the Temple Mount—or “Haram al-Sharif” to the Muslims—home to the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque but also the holiest site in Judaism. Arafat said no.

  Clinton then flew to Okinawa for a G-8 summit for four days. He returned and pushed both sides hard—more three a.m. negotiations. The two sides were closer than they’d ever been. There was little substantive disagreement anymore, but both parties, Arafat especially, were hung up over the word sovereignty. When it finally became clear to Clinton that there was no budging them on this point, he suspended the talks. But he now said he had “a better idea of each side’s bottom line.”

  * * *

  It was the heat of the political season. Vice President Al Gore would be running against Governor George W. Bush of Texas, son of the former president. With the nation at peace and the economy still humming along nicely, it shouldn’t have been a difficult election for Gore. But the incumbent party always has a hard time winning a third term, and Gore tied himself in knots trying to embrace Clinton’s policy legacy while simultaneously distancing himself from Clinton’s personal failings. Tensions between the two men were said to be high, but it didn’t prevent the president from giving a valedictory speech to the Democratic convention in Los Angeles that made a better case for Gore than Gore could make for himself. Gore spent most of the year just trailing Bush in the polls.

  It had been a rocky year on the trail for Hillary, too. At first she had been running against Mayor Giuliani, whose record of stunning success in crime fighting was offset by a habit of going out of his way to alienate groups that didn’t vote for him, especially African Americans. But in the late spring, Giuliani got caught up in his own sex scandal, as an extramarital affair that he’d made surprisingly little effort to hide was finally exposed. Then he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He quit the race, replaced by Congressman Rick Lazio, who upon entry seemed to be a formidable candidate against Clinton—being Italian and from Long Island and a moderate-to-conservative Republican were three good things to be in those days when seeking statewide office in New York. And Clinton, unlike her husband, was not a natural on the campaign trail.

  In the fall of an election year when the incumbent isn’t running, no one in the political world pays much attention to the president, unless something newsworthy happens. And on October 12, 2000, something did. The navy guided-missile destroyer the USS Cole was harbored in the port of Aden, Yemen, for a routine refueling stop when a small fiberglass boat carrying explosives and two suicide bombers rammed the vessel’s port side. The bomb made a fifty-foot gash in the ship; seventeen sailors were killed and thirty-nine injured. Al-Qaeda had struck again. Or so it was presumed—but not, at the time, verified. Clinton wanted to strike at bin Laden one more time, but without a clear finding of al-Qaeda’s responsibility his hands were tied. (Bin Laden would claim responsibility in a March 2001 video.)

  Surprisingly, the bombing didn’t reverberate loudly in the presidential contest. But in the New York Senate race, the state Republican Party was paying for robocalls to voters saying that Hillary Clinton had accepted money from an Arab organization that “openly brags about its support for a Mideast terrorism group, the same kind of terrorism that killed our sailors on the USS Cole.” Whether New Yorkers had or had not come to love Hillary, the idea that the First Lady of the United States consorted with Cole bombing–types was a bit much. Once again, the right, in its Clinton hatred, had gone too far and had presumed that less ideologically motivated voters shared all their negative presumptions about the Clintons. She handled her debates a
nd the pressure of the campaign’s final days well, and by the time election night rolled around, she’d racked up an eight-point win over Lazio and would become a U.S. senator for a state where she had never lived.

  The mood was festive in her Manhattan hotel victory-party ballroom—until the large television screens flashed the news that the networks were putting Florida, previously called for Gore, back into the too-close-to-call camp. The drama and trauma that gripped the nation for the next month was not, strictly speaking, for the incumbent president to comment on. It was his duty to ensure an orderly transfer of power, and he would do so. When the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Bush v. Gore, giving the presidency to George W. Bush, Clinton released a statement noting that the “closely divided” court had spoken, praising both candidates, and calling for national unity. Later, in My Life, he put it far more bluntly: “It was an appalling decision. A narrow conservative majority that had made a virtual fetish of states’ rights had now stripped Florida of a clear state function: the right to recount the votes the way it always had.”

  The fact that the next president was going to be Bush, who would surely tilt much more in Israel’s direction, helped give Clinton even more impetus to encourage the Palestinians to come back to the table for one last push for peace. Israeli and Palestinian teams traveled to Washington, where they began meetings in mid-December at Bolling Air Force Base. On December 23, Clinton brought the negotiators to the White House. He sat them down in the Cabinet Room and slowly read to them his “parameters” for final negotiation toward striking a deal—how much of the West Bank the Palestinians would get, the size of the land swap that Israel would get, the status of Jerusalem, refugees, security agreements—everything. There were minor details to be agreed to, but these broad parameters, the president said, were nonnegotiable.

  They broke for Christmas. On December 27, a huge breakthrough: Barak’s cabinet accepted the terms—an Israeli government was ready to end the occupation and say yes to a Palestinian state. Arafat equivocated. Clinton called other Arab leaders, including Egypt’s president Hosni Mubarak, urging them to tell Arafat to take the deal. On January 2, 2001, he brought Arafat to the White House. Arafat asked questions. But Clinton could tell from Arafat’s body language that he didn’t have the guts to take the step to become a peacemaker, to endure the rage that would surely have been directed at him from his radical flank. He never said no outright, but he never said yes. Clinton and others tried to lay out to him the implications of walking away—Bush was coming in, the Israeli right (led now by Ariel Sharon) would surely win the next election in the wake of a collapse, and peace would become an impossibility. But he froze. Shortly before Clinton left office, Arafat called him to thank him for his efforts and tell him he was a great man. “I am not a great man,” the president replied. “I am a failure, and you have made me one.”

  * * *

  The previous president to serve two full terms, Ronald Reagan, floated out of the White House on vast clouds of goodwill. Clinton careened out of the place ducking lightning bolts. True to form, he did one or two things that gave his critics some material, and—true to form—those critics went overboard in exaggerating and even fabricating allegations of misconduct, which the media, also true to form, gobbled up voraciously.

  On his last day in office, Clinton announced the traditional set of presidential pardons. Recipients included the faithful and courageous Susan McDougal, whom Ken Starr had kept in prison and even solitary confinement because she wouldn’t say what he wanted her to say about Clinton; Dan Rostenkowski, the longtime chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee laid low in a banking scandal; two female members of the radical Weather Underground; Patty Hearst, the heiress who’d joined another radical group in the 1970s; and the president’s own brother, Roger, pardoned on drug-related charges even though he had already served his term.

  These provoked the usual amounts of sputtering. But then there was Marc Rich, who owed $48 million in back taxes and had fled justice, living in Switzerland, and whose estranged wife, Denise, was a big Clinton donor. The howls of indignation were ferocious. For a couple of hours on the closing moments of Clinton’s 2,922nd day in office, it was almost like the Lewinsky scandal again, as cable talking heads literally screamed in disbelief that Clinton could do such a thing. Clinton maintained that he was following the recommendation of his Justice Department—specifically, Eric Holder—and that Rich would still be subject to civil legal action. It was also the case that Ehud Barak had intervened with Clinton three times on Rich’s behalf. (Rich had spent some time in Israel and engaged in much philanthropy there.) But from the point of view of appearances, it was a hard decision to defend.

  In the succeeding days, another story went viral—that the Clintons had “stolen” furniture that properly belonged not to them but to the White House and had hauled it up to their new home in New York. Again, they were accused of all manner of thievery; again, a lot of what was said simply wasn’t true. They had received nearly fifteen thousand gifts in eight years. The system to log them was a mess; it turned out that they had taken a handful of items that the donors had intended for the White House permanent collection, and the Clintons returned them (and ultimately had three of those gifts returned back to them after it was determined that they were right to have taken them).

  Then there was the matter of Hillary’s alleged “gift registry” at Borsheims, a high-end Nebraska retailer. The idea here was that as an incoming senator, Hillary would be subject to strict gift rules, so she supposedly contacted all her friends and asked them to buy her fancy things before she was sworn in so she could skirt the ethics rules. It fit perfectly into the narrative of Hillary as that entitled rhymes-with-witch that the media had pushed since 1992. She did receive some gifts from friends via Borsheims, sixteen soup bowls and a tureen, but no hard evidence was ever produced that she’d “registered like a bride,” as she was often accused of having done.

  And, finally, there was the scandal of the missing Ws. Here, it was alleged that Clinton aides had left the West Wing in a tatty state for the incoming Bush aides: file cabinets glued shut, presidential seals steamed off doors, wires cut. And, most shockingly of all, Ws yanked off computer keyboards, mocking the new president’s middle initial and sobriquet. The message of this story? “The trailer-trash Clintons and their staff had enjoyed one last bacchanal at taxpayer expense,” as Salon’s Eric Boehlert put it. The only problem was that the entire story was apparently a fabrication. Four months later, a Government Accounting Office report found that there was “no damage to the offices of the White House’s East or West Wings or [Executive Office Building],” and that Bush’s own representatives had reported “there is no record of damage that may have been deliberately caused by the employees of the Clinton administration.”

  It was a crazy ending, but it was inevitable that Bill Clinton would go out the way he came in, embattled and taking enormous amounts of incoming fire. And he did it with his usual astonishing ability to compartmentalize and glide through it. On his final day in office, at the exact same moment that the news channels were pulverizing him over the Marc Rich pardon, Clinton went to Andrews Air Force Base to take his last flight on Air Force One, up to his new home in Westchester County, New York; in the hangar, he gave one last speech to his supporters. The crowd held aloft placards saying “Thank You” and “Please Don’t Go”; the president smiled contentedly as he repeated three times: “We did a lot of good.” The last public sentence he uttered that day, aside from “Thank you” and “God bless you,” was: “You gave me the ride of my life, and I tried to give as good as I got.” It was an absolutely fitting pugilistic image with which to conclude a turbulent eight years. The attacks never stopped but, as he had with that ram those many years before, he absorbed them all and survived.

  Epilogue

  Sunday, January 21, 2001, was the first morning in eighteen years—ten as governor, eight as president—that Bill Clinton woke up without
someone to make his breakfast. A small entourage of friends was staying with him and Hillary at the Clintons’ chosen new home in Chappaqua, New York, and Bill suggested that the group venture out to the village’s small downtown for coffee and breakfast. As Joe Conason tells the story in Man of the World, his book on Clinton’s post-presidency, the customers at Lang’s Little Shop and Delicatessen greeted him with chants of “Eight more years!” But another, less enthusiastic assemblage was gathered out on the sidewalk—a dozen or so reporters, screaming questions about the Marc Rich pardon.

  The Rich story didn’t die, really, until late that summer. Official Washington was enraged at the pardon, and somehow Clinton hadn’t grasped how negatively it would be seen. Denise Rich, the fugitive’s ex-wife, had donated more than $500,000 to the Democratic Party, and the pardon was universally seen as payback to her. House Republicans again held hearings and issued subpoenas. For a while, there loomed the possibility of a federal criminal investigation. At the same time, cable outrage continued over the White House gifts matter and the supposed purloined keyboard Ws. Clinton himself stayed barricaded in his new home, fixated on the cable news, fuming. Friends implored him to quit watching. Conason writes: “He would promise to stop, and then get on the phone with friends and ask whether they had seen the latest cable TV slurs against him.”

  It was bad. And, incredibly, it got worse. Former presidents need office space, for which the taxpayers foot the bill. For his, Clinton initially chose one of the newest and most expensive pieces of commercial real estate in all of midtown Manhattan—the top floor of a fifty-six-story skyscraper, the Carnegie Hall Tower, which had been recently erected on West 57th Street, adjacent to the legendary Carnegie Hall. The annual rent would run north of $600,000, which was more than the government was spending on all the other living ex-presidents combined. It was an unimaginably perception-blind choice. Again, Congress intervened, advising that an appropriate amount would be nearer $200,000. After some absolutely brutal tabloid headlines and cable news segments, the aide who had originally identified the Carnegie space, Karen Tramontano, passed along to Clinton a suggestion she’d received from Congressman Charlie Rangel—that Clinton consider setting up his office in the Adam Clayton Powell State Office Building on West 125th Street in Harlem, which would cost a fraction of the Carnegie rent. Clinton resisted at first—he saw it as backing down to the mob, Conason writes—but as he considered the new round of merciless coverage and thought through the matter, he came to see the public-relations benefit of relocating to a neighborhood where his approval rating was surely around 90 percent, for which he could perform many a good deed—and where the residents didn’t care very much about Marc Rich.