Clinton, Inc.: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine

by Daniel Halper

  Former president Gerald Ford, whose wife, Betty, had become an expert on addiction through the Betty Ford Center, once reached the same conclusion. “Betty and I have talked about this a lot,” Ford told biographer Thomas DeFrank in 1998 (DeFrank published a collection of his conversations with the deceased president in a 2007 book titled Write It When I’m Gone). “He’s sick—he’s got an addiction. He needs treatment.”33

  Clinton also found a new friendship that would have an outsized role in his postpresidential life. At least for a while. Ronald Burkle was a billionaire in the supermarket industry who got his start as a bag boy at one of his father’s grocery stores. Labeled the “billionaire party boy” in the tabloids, he formed a close relationship with Bill Clinton in Clinton’s postpresidential life. (They first had met in 1992.) Each used the other—Burkle showed Clinton how to make money and put him on his payroll as a paid advisor to Burkle’s group of investment funds. Meanwhile, Clinton gave Burkle access to Clinton’s network of A-list celebrities, CEOs, and politicos. Clinton was happy to make connections for Burkle while giving himself, as the New York Times put it in 2006, “the potential to make tens of millions of dollars without great effort and at virtually no risk.”34

  The two flew around the world together in Burkle’s private plane—a Boeing 757 that, according to an exposé on Clinton in the July 2008 issue of Vanity Fair, was privately labeled “Air Fuck One” by aides for its reputation of being close to a flying brothel. The magazine reported one scene in Paris involving Clinton and Burkle, whom the magazine described as “Clinton’s bachelor buddy, fund-raiser, and business partner.” Burkle, the magazine noted, had come to an event “with an attractive blonde, described by a fellow guest as ‘not much older than 19, if she was that.’ ” Burkle was devoted to Clinton, according to a wide variety of sources. While the duo had many surface similarities—they were of the same generation, from modest beginnings, and of course enjoyed reputations as womanizers—the Burkle-Clinton friendship, like many others in Clinton’s life, was not destined to last.

  Burkle aside, no one person was more important to Clinton’s postpresidential life than Doug Band, water-carrier, fixer-upper, and all around consigliere. In the third episode of The West Wing, Charlie Young learns that he’s being considered for a job as the president’s body man. It’s “traditionally a young guy, twenty to twenty-five years old,” Josh Lyman tells Charlie during an interview, “excels academically, strong in personal responsibility and discretion, presentable appearance.”

  When the actor who played Charlie Young, Dulé Hill, was researching his role, he asked for advice from Doug Band, who had recently become President Bill Clinton’s body man. Band had arrived at the White House in 1995 as an unpaid intern straight out of college, where the fratty English major—with, in what might later be seen as an irony, a minor in ethics—had been president of the University of Florida’s council of fraternities. Unlike many starry-eyed twenty-somethings, Band arrived in Washington without any appearance of an ideology or agenda, other than an ambition to be around powerful people. When his fellow intern Monica Lewinsky invited Band to the White House Congressional Ball, he accepted the invitation. He wasn’t so much interested in Lewinsky as in the chance to be around so many movers and shakers in one place.

  After Band’s internship, the tall, dark-haired, and friendly-faced Floridian was hired by the White House counsel’s office. He started taking night classes at Georgetown’s law school, and his colleagues assumed he’d aim for a job as a lawyer after graduation. But Band had his eyes on backrooms, not courtrooms. He turned heads when he applied for a job on the White House advance team—which came with an office in the West Wing, not in the Old Executive Office Building, like the counsel’s office—and by 2000, he was Clinton’s body man.

  Band was finally where he wanted to be: at Bill Clinton’s side. When the administration ended and Goldman Sachs offered him a high-paying job in New York, Band turned it down. Clinton was establishing the William J. Clinton Foundation, and Band had big ideas about what it could do for Clinton—and for Band.

  They hit the road together. For the next decade, Clinton and Band were almost inseparable. He certainly saw his young male aide far more often than his wife. Those most familiar with Clinton’s activities estimate that since leaving office, the former president spends around 320 nights a year on the road—a number so staggeringly high, it’s really hard to say that he even has a place he can call home. It’s hotel room after hotel room. Fund-raiser after fund-raiser. One global awareness event (for AIDS or climate change or any liberal cause) after another.

  He and Band traveled together to approximately 125 countries and two thousand cities. They met with titans of industry and heads of state. They played cards late into the night and flew around together on Ron Burkle’s plane. Clinton once said he “wouldn’t be able to get through the day” without Band,35 and he seemed to confirm his trust and dependence on Band in 2004 when the Clinton Foundation’s chief of staff, Maggie Williams, tried to fire Band for evading her authority. She was tired of Band acting like he was in charge of Clinton’s schedule, the foundation’s employees, and its multibillion-dollar agenda, but with Clinton’s support, Band stayed at the foundation. Williams didn’t. “That’s when I realized,” a Clinton associate told the New Republic, “this guy has got it figured out—he’s never going to go away.”36

  Band came to know more about Clinton than Band knew about anyone else in the world—and probably more about Clinton than anyone else has ever known. “In some part of his mind, he melded them into being one person,” says the Clinton associate. “You thought that if he said something, it was coming from the top. . . . If he called and said, ‘We need tulips for the apartment,’ you assumed it was the president who needed tulips for the apartment.”37

  To his enemies within ClintonWorld, Band came to see himself as Clinton’s “equal”—entitled to eat at the most exclusive restaurants, sleep in the ritziest hotels, and carry around rolls of hundred-dollar bills.

  Even before he exited the White House, Clinton examined various models to follow in postpresidential life. Unless his life’s ambition was to play golf or paint pictures of birds, there weren’t many great examples among modern presidents. George H. W. Bush understood his time in the spotlight was done and was happy to live a quiet life of luxury with his wife and family. Ronald Reagan gave a couple of speeches when he was out of office but his health left him in bad enough shape that he didn’t have much of a choice but to retire from the spotlight. Gerald Ford moved to the golf course and successfully stayed out of the news.

  Clinton read books about former presidents with more active postpresidential lives, most notably John Quincy Adams and Jimmy Carter. Adams had remained in politics: He’s the only ex-president to really have a political life, serving nearly twenty years in the House of Representatives after the White House. Though both Clintons publicly mused that Bill might run for another office someday, that wasn’t really practical. For one, there was Hillary’s career to consider now. Bill’s campaign would just dilute the brand, taking money, attention, and support away from her.

  As much as he hated to admit it, the most relevant example came from a man he despised: James Earl Carter Jr.

  “Bill Clinton found the prospect of looking to Jimmy Carter totally unattractive,” writes Clinton in Exile author Carol Felsenthal. “How galling it was to Clinton to give even a moment’s thought to Carter, whom he genuinely disliked—Carter and Clinton had a long, unpleasant history, and the ever-pious Carter made no attempt to keep private his disgust at Clinton’s trysts with Monica Lewinsky.”38

  Yet Carter’s case was perhaps the most relevant, since he, like Clinton, was a young ex-president and a Democrat in the modern era. The peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia, was just fifty-six when he left office; Clinton was fifty-four. Like Clinton, Carter also believed he had much work yet to do and would carry it out as only an ex-president could. So Clinton studied the
Carter Center, the do-gooder organization in Carter’s home state of Georgia established to promote human rights, mainly abroad. Clinton also studied the diplomacy and humanitarian work that his fellow former southern Democratic governor had done since leaving the White House.

  “It was a brilliant strategic model,” says former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, a Republican, in an interview. Clinton has managed “to create a cloak of invisibility based on his sincerity and goodness, so whatever he does must be moral and justified.”

  “Postpresidencies are wonderful because they get to avoid the big red-button, hot-button controversies,” Ari Fleischer told me. “The Clinton Foundation can focus on feel-good activities, all of which has helped bring President Clinton back.”

  One person familiar with Clinton’s postpresidential agenda did not hide the element of cynicism within it. “Look at what a big deal the [Bill & Melinda] Gates Foundation is today,” he says by way of example. “But you also have to take into account why and how it started, right. I mean the Gates Foundation started as an antidote to the bad press he was getting by what he did as it relates to the antitrust stuff [involving Microsoft]. . . . Carter was largely the same in a way—to counterbalance what he did as a lackluster president.”

  There were a few differences between the Carter and Clinton approaches, however. As one associate familiar with the projects put it to me, “President Carter does five hundred different things, but the Clinton model was to be more effective in a few things, more narrowly.” Those issues included a focus on global development and HIV/AIDS.

  Also unlike Carter, Clinton had another primary motivating factor besides rebuilding his reputation: money. Lots and lots of it. Not having money wasn’t new for Clinton. He was always a poor man. He was born to a single mother in Hope, Arkansas, mere months after his father drowned in a ditch after losing control of his car. Clinton’s mother did her best to raise him by herself, but would often rely on his grandparents to watch him and raise him. Clinton’s grandfather worked two jobs: running a grocery store and, at night, being a watchman at a local sawmill, according to Clinton’s retelling of his family history.

  Clinton “grew up feeling” the Depression, and with it came a sense of poverty and unease about money.39 It was a feeling that would follow him the rest of his life, and was particularly present when he left the White House. At that time, Clinton is believed to have had about $12 million in unpaid legal fees as a result of the various investigations into his affair with Monica Lewinsky, sexual harassment charges from Paula Jones, the Whitewater investigation, and other scandals that had embroiled him. Getting impeached had taken a financial toll on the president and his family.

  It was his duty, he believed, to repay these debts and to ensure that he’d never be in such a financial situation again. And, because he was so unsure of his health even in the immediate years after leaving the White House, he wanted to provide for his family—more than enough to live on, just in case his health failed him and he unexpectedly died.

  He’d do what he had done to get him this far in life already: a combination of joining his gift of gab with his ability to bring important people together into the same room to work toward a similar goal. But instead of making laws and political deals, now the primary focus would be to make money.

  “No matter how much money he has, it’s never gonna be enough, because he was so poor at one point,” says a former aide. Filling his coffers with money is his way to make up for a childhood where he felt deprived, the aide reflects, and Clinton will embroil himself in all sorts of questionable deals in the pursuit of wealth. Money is the latest of Bill Clinton’s many addictions.

  In 1989, after President Ronald Reagan left office, he received scathing criticism in the press for his decision to receive a $2 million speaking fee during a visit to Japan. The Los Angeles Times was among many in offering the opinion that “the main impression to be overcome is that he has been inappropriately cashing in on his eight-year presidency.”40 His postpresidential approval ratings tumbled. Reagan had nothing on Bill Clinton, who has cashed in on his time in public service to build a financial and political empire. Leaving office, Clinton would once again lower the bar for what was considered acceptable behavior, with only occasional scrutiny from the press.

  The former president has earned well over $100 million in speaking fees, according to some estimates, including $17 million in one year alone. (A typical fee for a speaking appearance is $250,000.) He received a $15 million advance for his 2004 autobiography, My Life, which, reflecting its author, was largely considered a bulky, self-absorbed tome with moments of sparkle and brilliance.

  Following Carter’s lead, Clinton established a number of do-gooder foundations. The first was the William J. Clinton Foundation, a nonprofit established in 2001 and dedicated to issues including “health security; economic empowerment; leadership development and citizen service; and racial, ethnic and religious reconciliation.” The second was the Clinton Global Initiative, established in 2005 with the mission of “conven[ing] global leaders to create and implement innovative solutions to the world’s most pressing problems.”

  Clinton was also nurturing a political organization and assembling a coalition that would be ready for Hillary. In contrast to most former presidents, who were known to campaign on occasion for various big-name candidates, Bill Clinton stayed involved in a “huge number of political campaigns,” a former high-level Clinton aide tells me. “He’ll go out and do fund-raisers for people running for state senate and Congress and Senate and other things. They’ve kept their network very much alive that they cultivated when he was running for president the first time, even before he was running for president. If you look at some of the fund-raising he’s done for state and local candidates and even getting involved in races from time to time, that you wouldn’t necessarily think he’d get involved in, it’s pretty extraordinary.”

  The aide added, “He knows every congressional district in the country. Clinton could go toe-to-toe with that guy around each district and what the dynamics are. It’s something he’s spent a lifetime thinking about and living. I think it’s just a passion, for lack of a better word.”

  Maintaining this network had dual purposes for Bill Clinton. For one, Clinton is a natural barnstormer who loves making an argument before a cheering crowd of supporters. But the other reason was of course more personal. As one senior aide to the outgoing president told me, “he felt he owed Hillary the presidency.” This and Chelsea were what really held them together. The duo always kept their options open for a return to the White House, an opportunity that might present itself in 2004, when George W. Bush would likely seek a second term. But first there was a problem that the Clintons needed to overcome.

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  Charm Offensives

  “When Clinton was president, the common media portrayal from relatively hostile media was that Clinton was this lovable Bubba who was charming and a rascally rogue who just could manipulate people, but not very bright kind of people. But Hillary was this unpleasant grind . . . If anything, the exact opposite is true.”

  —Michael Medved

  Hillary Clinton’s advocacy of groups such as the Center for American Progress and Media Matters, her vocal opposition to Bush administration policies, and her continued belief in the need to counter the “vast right-wing conspiracy” were not feints. She remained a committed liberal throughout her Senate tenure, voting to raise taxes more than 232 times, opposing conservative judges nominated by President Bush to the bench, including Supreme Court justices John Roberts (the chief justice) and Samuel Alito, and eventually opposing the Iraq War, despite first supporting it. Her poll numbers reflected this. In the Gallup polls, her numbers were disastrous for anyone seeking to win the White House by appealing to independent voters. Her unfavorables were consistently in the mid- to upper 40s. Among independents she fared only slightly better. Among Republicans she was easily one of the most unpopular politicians in America. Ga
llup recorded her unfavorable ratings among that group consistently in the 70s and 80s. If Hillary had any hope of seeking higher office, she needed to do something to at least soften her image as a brittle, harsh leftist radical and win over a few center-right votes.

  What has been little understood in the past decade, from 2001 to the present, is how successfully the Clintons undertook a systematic, comprehensive, and sustained effort to win over leaders in the GOP, especially figures who were once their biggest critics. In return, both Clintons were able to develop a bipartisan, statesmanlike image that had eluded them through eight years in the White House.

  Hillary’s difficulties with the right were well earned. Not only had she famously raged against a “vast right-wing conspiracy,” but she led efforts to wage a counteroffensive against them. As was revealed during the impeachment investigations, the Clintons hired private investigators to look into the personal lives of their political enemies. At one point, their dishonesty about these efforts won the ire of press secretary Mike McCurry. “On several occasions, McCurry threatened to quit if they kept deceiving him—once, early in the year when they misled him about whether they were using private investigators to research Clinton enemies and, more recently, when [White House counsel Chuck] Ruff refused to tell him whether Starr had issued a subpoena for the president’s testimony,” the Washington Post’s Peter Baker reported.1

  The Clintons also got lucky in who their enemies were. For the most prominent congressional Republicans during the Clinton administration—who tried to find out just how many laws the Clintons had broken, or who voted to impeach or convict the president of his crimes—decline, defeat, or disgrace awaited them. The aging and once widely respected Henry Hyde, who chaired the House Judiciary Committee, was outed as an adulterer, his sterling reputation tarnished. Also exposed were affairs by Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, who resigned; by Louisiana congressman Bob Livingston, who would have replaced him; and by Dan Burton, the Indiana congressman who exhibited an almost Javert-like determination to uncover Clintonian duplicity and dirty dealings.