by Nancy Gibbs
The incoming president was trolling for tips on how to give a good speech.
The question was especially striking, coming from a man who had just been elected and never seemed to lack for confidence. But rallying your base or even running a national campaign is not the same as leading a country—all of it—through whatever passage might lie ahead. Could the club help with that?
Clinton had to relish this moment, just as Reagan had relished teaching Clinton how to salute eight years earlier. And so the sitting president proceeded to hold a mini-clinic of his own for the new kid: timing, Clinton replied, it’s all in the timing, the pacing, and the careful parsing of the words on the page, letting it unfold like a good sermon or lecture. But Clinton liked what he saw; he said to friends, “Bush really connects. It’s a mistake to underestimate him.”
By the time inauguration day approached, it was clear that Clinton did not really want to leave, despite—or maybe because of—all the blows he had survived. He was only fifty-four years old, younger than any two-term president other than Teddy Roosevelt. It was not just the reflexive reluctance to relinquish vast power; this departure scraped at him so deeply he took it upon himself to study the 22nd Amendment closely, concluding that there was no other way to read it than as a lifetime ban on more than two terms. It might be possible to slip back in if he was somehow elected vice president and then ascended to the top job in the event of the commander in chief’s death, he explained. But he realized that the idea would seem outrageous to most people. “I love this job,” he said in the final weeks in office. “I think I’m getting better at it. I’d run again in a heartbeat if I could.”
But the strange and slippery manner of Clinton’s exit only helped remind people why they were ready for him to leave. The outgoing president issued more than 175 pardons in his final days, including one absolving Marc Rich of fifty-one charges of tax evasion, fraud, and racketeering. Clinton ignored virtually all of his top aides’ advice when he signed the Rich pardon and, to make matters worse, it turned out that some of the people who had been pushing hardest for Rich behind the scenes had also sent “going away” presents to Clinton and his wife that totaled nearly $200,000. As the weeks passed, the Rich affair took on a life of its own. Rich’s ex-wife, Denise, turned out to be a $450,000 donor to Clinton’s presidential library fund, which was just being launched. At best, the arrangement reeked of poor judgment; at worst it looked like a slimy quid pro quo. Jimmy Carter labeled the arrangement “disgraceful.” Outgoing commerce secretary Bill Daley described it as “terrible, devastating and rather appalling.”
The pardons, and the congressional hearings they engendered, guaranteed that Clinton’s ghost would linger in Washington well after Clinton himself had left. In early February, Time put a tiny picture of Clinton wearing a sweatshirt and tennis shoes on its cover with the line “The Incredible Shrinking ex-President” and noted how strange it was “to watch a shiny new ex-president disappear under a freak mudslide.” The next week, Clinton wrote an op-ed in the New York Times trying to explain “what he did and why.” Former aides explained that Clinton would happily call everyone in the country and explain it to them in person if it would help.
All this noise sweetened Bush’s honeymoon. Clinton “is making the honesty and integrity case for us,” an aide said. “We don’t have to do anything.” In fact, they were doing plenty. The Bush White House pulled out every stop to make it clear that a new team was in town, that it was nothing like the last, and no matter what the outcome of the election, there would be no doubting who was president now. They claimed departing Clinton aides had vandalized the White House, prying the letter W off computer keyboards and pilfering government property. Meanwhile Bush aides moved to freeze all new regulations before the inaugural parade was over, rolled back as many of Clinton’s executive orders as they could find, and announced over and over that the old king was gone and living in Chappaqua, New York, where the Clintons had bought a new home. The comparisons kept coming: Where Clinton could second-guess all night, Bush didn’t “do nuance.” Where Clinton was tardy, Bush was punctual to the point of arriving at events a few minutes early. Where Clinton was often the best-informed person in White House meetings, Bush was only too happy to be tutored by aides. If Bubba had wandered into the Oval Office around nine and worked past midnight, Dubya was a straight eight-hours man, in by 7:15 A.M., gone by dinner, and asleep by ten, if not earlier. “I don’t like to sit around in meetings for hours and hours and hours,” Bush told Time in March. “People will tell you, I get to the point.”
If Bush was determined to show who was now in charge, Clinton was equally prepared to respect the club’s rules of succession. In early 2001, for example, Clinton appealed to National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice for permission to give a speech in Hong Kong at the very moment that the White House was trying to negotiate the release of twenty-four detained servicemen after their U.S. Navy EP-3 aircraft had been forced down over China in April.
Clinton wanted to go and give the speech—in part because he needed the money. But he didn’t want to get in the way of delicate administration efforts to retrieve the crew, if not the airplane itself. Complicating the journey, Clinton knew, was the presence at the Hong Kong event of Jiang Zemin, the Chinese president and an old Clinton friend. Clinton could not go and ignore Jiang. But he didn’t want to take the meeting and run afoul of Bush’s efforts to bring the crisis to a close—much less be seen interfering. And so he put in a call to Rice, whom he knew well because she had been the Stanford University provost when his daughter, Chelsea, had been an undergraduate there.
“I said, ‘Condi, I need to give a speech, they’re gonna pay me a ridiculous amount of money and you guys nearly bankrupted me. I’m an American first and here’s the problem, Jiang Zemin is going to be there and the airplane’s still on the island and I cannot go there without seeing him. He’s my friend and I will not insult him or be rude or do anything. So you have to tell me what to do. If you don’t want me to go, I won’t go. If you want me to go, I’ll deliver the message and I will make sure he knows it’s President Bush’s message, not mine. There’s only one president at a time, whether I agree with it or not.’
“And Condi called me back and said ‘we’d like for you to go.’ And so I said ‘Okay, what am I supposed to say?’ . . . I wanted them to have the confidence that I would never try to undermine their policy. He had to know that I would never stab him in the back.”
It would not be long before that promise would be tested.
Who Lost bin Laden?
The attacks on September 11, 2001, brought everyone together—including the members of the club. This is the one sure summons, when the nation is startled out of its habits and hopes by cataclysm, in this case a shocking ambush that was all the more terrifying for its simple efficiency; nineteen men, four planes, one morning that forever changed the meaning of the date. It was the bloodiest day on American soil since the Civil War, and by the time the day was over it was clear that this untested president whose eight months had been no better than average was now facing an act of war by an enemy unlike any in the nation’s history.
It wasn’t just the country under attack; it was the presidency itself. Bush was traveling in Florida when a “credible threat” forced the evacuation of the White House, and eventually State and Justice and all the federal office buildings. The west side of the Pentagon was already in flames. Secret Service officers had automatic weapons drawn as they patrolled Lafayette Park, across from the White House. A security detail rushed Vice President Dick Cheney to a bunker by the seat of his pants; he told Bush aboard Air Force One that security agencies believed both the White House and Bush’s plane were targets. In Bush’s airborne office, aides heard Bush on the phone. “That’s what we’re paid for, boys,” he said. “We’re gonna’ take care of this. We’re going to find out who did this. They’re not going to like me as President.”
Ford, Carter, the senior Bush, and Clin
ton all flew to Washington for a grim and moving memorial service at the National Cathedral three days later. The president invoked FDR’s phrase about “the warm courage of national unity” to heal and then bind Americans. After the speech, the world watched as Bush’s father, now seventy-seven, reached over and squeezed his son’s hand in the front pew.
But once America’s dramatic invasion of Afghanistan gave way to a less satisfying occupation, whatever unity had existed within the club cracked under the pressure of political scapegoating. By midsummer 2002, a much broader argument broke out about which president—Bush or Clinton—was most responsible for permitting Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network to get big enough to attack the United States in the first place. This line of inquiry, which would eventually become a focus of a huge bipartisan commission, had the potential to leave permanent marks on both presidents. The best way to avoid being blamed, both camps realized, was to point a finger at the other. Former Clinton national security officials began telling reporters in mid-2002 that they had clearly and repeatedly warned Bush, Cheney, NSC advisor Condoleezza Rice, and other Bush aides about the dangers of al Qaeda during the transition. Richard Clarke, Clinton’s top terrorist advisor, presented the Bush team with a plan to aggressively target al Qaeda’s leaders after Bush was sworn in, and though Clarke remained on Bush’s NSC staff for a time, his plan was ignored. Clinton partisans alleged that the Bush team was much more interested in halting nuclear proliferation in North Korea and Iran and revising a missile defense treaty with Russia than it was in finding a rich Saudi troublemaker in Afghanistan. This was a serious charge—not only because it would amount to negligence if true, but also because it threatened to become a useful weapon for the Democrats as the 2004 election approached.
In response, the Republicans gave as good as they were getting. Vice President Cheney led the White House effort to kill the bipartisan 9/11 Commission to investigate the roots of the attacks and warned Democrats in private that Clinton and his party would be damaged if the inquiry went forward. Other Bush allies charged that Clinton had missed multiple chances to kill bin Laden in the 1990s either because he lacked the will or because he was distracted by the Lewinsky scandal. If anyone was asleep at the switch, they argued, it was Bubba not Dubya. This line of argument had some merit as well: though Clinton launched air strikes on bin Laden’s training camps in August 1998, right in the middle of some of the most unpleasant days of the sex scandal, several other military operations against al Qaeda were planned and readied on his watch but never activated. On the rare occasions when Clinton’s intelligence officers could claim that they were certain of bin Laden’s whereabouts, his legal advisors were reluctant to authorize attacks that were thinly veiled assassination efforts. “Almost all of the ‘authorities’ President Clinton provided to us with regard to bin Laden were predicated on the planning of a capture operation,” CIA director George Tenet noted. “Bin Laden could resist and might be killed in the ensuing battle. But the context was almost always to attempt to capture him first.”
When the bipartisan 9/11 panel released its findings in July 2004, it was praised for being detailed, well written, and evenhanded. But it laid barely a glove on either president. The final 567-page report was a strange, no-fault document that seemed to presume that the two commanders in chief, at least, did nothing wrong: Clinton was cleared of any charges that he had missed a chance to kill bin Laden in advance of the 2001 attacks; the report noted that he had instead tried a variety of tactics and strategies designed to degrade al Qaeda. At the same time, Bush was spared any direct criticism for failing to act when he came into office and reported that some of his aides had their own doubts about the wisdom of targeting individuals. And where there was evidence of either president underperforming in the war on terrorism, the report detailed those in such neutral terms that the reader could be forgiven for not knowing how many opportunities had been missed. The club would have surely supported this narrative technique had it been put to a vote.
And in the matter of what Clinton had told Bush about bin Laden in their pre-inaugural conversation in December 2000? The two presidents had different recollections about that. Clinton specifically recalled warning Bush about bin Laden before the swearing in. “I think you will find that by far your biggest threat is bin Laden and the al Qaeda,” Clinton claims to have told Bush. “One of the great regrets of my presidency is that I didn’t get him for you, because I tried to.” But Bush remembered it differently. He told the 9/11 Commission that while the two men discussed terrorism in general that day, he had no recollection of any specific mention of al Qaeda by Clinton.
In the most critical conversation between an outgoing and an incoming president since Eisenhower briefed Kennedy, Clinton and Bush could not agree on who said what.
By the time their differing memories became public in the panel’s final report in July 2004, Bush and Clinton were well down the road toward a friendship. The first sign of warming came in late spring of 2004, when Bush and Clinton saw each other three times in the space of fifteen days. The men, along with Bush’s father, sat three abreast at the dedication ceremonies for a new World War II monument on the National Mall on Memorial Day; Clinton’s lengthy memoirs had just been released and Bush ribbed his predecessor that he would read the first half and his father would read the second.
The next week, Ronald Reagan died at the age of ninety-three; and so the presidents sat side by side at Reagan’s funeral at the National Cathedral. Three days after that, Bush welcomed the Clintons back to the White House for the unveiling of their official portraits. Bush praised Clinton at some length, but singled out his “far ranging knowledge of public policy, a great compassion for people in need, and the forward looking spirit Americans like in a president.” Laura Bush praised her predecessor as well. Clinton said he was humbled by Bush’s “kind and generous words. . . . Made me feel like I was a pickle stepping into history.”
Four days later, in a lengthy conversation over Diet Cokes at home in Chappaqua, Clinton had nearly as much sympathy for Bush as he had criticism. He worried that Bush had squandered a rare moment in American history to build national unity after years of partisan division. And he wondered whether Bush’s all-in focus on terrorism had consumed his presidency and led to headlong decisions like the invasion of Iraq. “I think we needed a little missionary zeal after 9/11,” he said. “But the exercise of power in the grip of any obsession is always a risk. There’s a difference between having convictions and obsessions. And, by the way, I had to fight this. I was almost obsessed with bin Laden and the record will reflect that. And you know, I have repeatedly defended President Bush against the left in Iraq, even though I don’t agree. I think he should have waited until the UN inspections were over.”
But Clinton had grudging admiration for the way Bush had managed the politics of 9/11 and how effectively he had neutralized the Democrats both in the way he got credit for creating the Department of Homeland Security in 2002 and over the war in Iraq that followed. “I always thought Bush was a good politician,” Clinton said. “I never thought he was dumb. There’s a difference between not knowing certain things and being dumb. But I never bought that. Not ever, not for a minute. I never believed it.”
As his wife’s campaign for the 2008 Democratic nomination got under way in 2007, Clinton explained to Bush that he may have to take a swing at him every now and then. “I said, ‘You know Hillary is in politics and because she is, sometimes it’s necessary for me to disagree with you. But I will always do it respectfully.’”
As Bush’s days in office began to wind down, he reached out to Clinton more, usually on weekends. The two men would talk on the phone, aides reported, discussing the ups and downs of the fall campaign, speaking in what one advisor said was a kind of shorthand code about voting blocs and state polls and political messaging. Bush’s aides made trips to Little Rock and tapped their counterparts for tips about how to plan, site, and build a presidential library.
BUSH AND BUSH:
Father and Son
By the time the younger man joined the club, the older man had known him for fifty-four years—all his life. They had already worked through a series of nicknames: Big George and Little George. Poppy and Junior. Now they could just use numbers, which they had stitched on their baseball caps: 41 and 43.
But mostly, obviously, ultimately, they were father and son. Of all the benefits the club could offer any president, none compared to the prospect of having someone a phone call away who knew the job better than any of your advisors but also knew your strong suits and blind spots, not to mention the birthdays of your children. Imagine having someone on speed dial who had also carried the punishing burdens of being commander in chief, but who had no agenda except your success. That would be quite a resource.
The ingredients were all there; starting in 2001, the club was poised for its finest hour ever.
And yet, both men tell a story of a relationship that was circumscribed. It started out that way for reasons of politics; it finished that way for reasons of policy. The two men functioned, as they explain it, not as nearly consecutive presidents but almost entirely as family; George W. Bush was not a president looking for advice but a son looking for understanding.