WILLIAM JEFFERSON CLINTON TOOK office in January 1993 promising to be a combination of Franklin Roosevelt and John Kennedy. Eight years later, after he was impeached by the House of Representatives for lying about his affair with former intern Monica Lewinsky, he seemed more a combination of Hugh Hefner, founder of the Playboy empire, and Otter, the charming but irresponsible fraternity boy in the movie Animal House. His presidency was a roller-coaster ride of ups and downs. He was by turns brilliant and reckless, endearingly suave and occasionally vulgar, endlessly inquisitive and profoundly self-centered.
Clinton started out with big ideas and overreached, particularly with his hugely complex, government-centered health-care reform plan of 1993. He placed his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, in charge of formulating and winning approval for the package, and it died miserably on Capitol Hill. Partly as a reaction to the White House’s display of political ineptitude and arrogance, the voters in 1994 gave Republicans control of Congress for the first time in a generation.
This forced Clinton from the left to the political center, where the country wanted him to be, and the GOP made him look even more moderate by shifting to the hard right. He went on to easily win a second term in 1996 by adopting centrist policies, such as balancing the budget, fighting crime, and promoting free trade. The economy boomed. Thanks in part to his conservative predecessors who helped to vanquish the Soviet Union, the United States emerged as the lone superpower. His job-approval ratings among voters soared. Yet Clinton’s undisciplined character became his tragic flaw.
For years there had been accusations that he was an adulterer but he always denied it. Yet he committed a remarkable act of stupidity by having an affair with Lewinsky, a talkative and immature admirer in the West Wing, at a time when his enemies were looking for as much dirt about him as they could find. Through this self-indulgence, he handed them a potentially lethal issue. Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr issued a scathing report to Congress in late 1998, detailing Clinton’s adulterous and deceptive conduct, and the House of Representatives impeached the president following a bitterly divisive debate. But the Senate acquitted him, deciding that impeachment by the House was enough punishment, and he remained in office. All this provided drama and controversy worthy of a TV sitcom, and Clinton continued to be an object of fascination even among his adversaries.
CLINTON’S BEHAVIOR ON Air Force One reflected all his positives and negatives, and there were abundant examples in each category because he was the most-traveled president in history. Over eight years, he flew a total of 1,409,090 miles. This was more than twice the mileage of the next most-traveled president, Ronald Reagan, who flew 675,640 miles during his eight years, according to records of the White House Military Office. Clinton made a total of 133 visits to foreign countries, averaging nearly 17 trips annually. During his two terms, in fact, Clinton made more foreign visits than Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon combined over the course of more than two decades. Clinton spent a total of 229 days in foreign countries, and his most extensive travel year was 1998, when he was trying to burnish his image to divert attention from the impeachment proceedings.
The only president to come close to Clinton’s rate of foreign travel was George Herbert Walker Bush, who loved foreign policy more than any other facet of the presidency. Bush made 60 visits to foreign countries in four years, but his rate of travel—15 trips per year—still fell short of his successor’s 17.
Habitually late, Clinton would alternate frenetic activity with periods of wasted time. He preferred to leave on a lengthy trip in the evening and travel all night, during which he would chat with aides, read, play cards, watch movies, and cadge a few hours of sleep. He would arrive the next morning and go right to his official schedule. This pattern guaranteed that he and the staff would arrive at nearly every destination bleary-eyed.
“The problem was that it didn’t matter really how much or how little sleep he got at night,” says a longtime aide. “He was always tired in the morning and wide awake at night. His body just took half a day to wake up.” He would swallow a sleeping pill or two so he could nap for five-hour blocs, a technique he coordinated with his staff and White House doctors. Even that couldn’t break the pattern.
As a result, Clinton considered Air Force One the perfect venue for all-night bull sessions—monologues, really, rather than LBJ-style harangues. He would exhaust members of his staff, who felt obliged to listen to his tales about the leaders he had just met, the places he had seen, the issues that were on his mind, and anything else that struck his fancy. One topic, especially with his closest confidants, was women, who always seemed eager to get near him, trying to shake his hand, hug him, wave at him, and otherwise capture his attention. And as he traveled, he would sometimes regale aides and friends with a review of the female sights he had seen in receiving lines, in crowds, or in welcoming committees, according to some of his traveling companions.
He occasionally let his volcanic temper erupt on the plane, although the tantrums passed quickly. En route to Chicago in mid-1993, Clinton noticed in his briefing book that his aides had nixed a visit with Mayor Richard M. Daley, who had wanted to see him. “Who the hell could make such a dumb fucking mistake?” the president yelled. His rage built on itself, and some of his aides thought he might even get violent. “Why are we not organized to do this?” shouted Clinton, his face beet red. He complained that he was constantly over-scheduled and was getting bogged down in trivia, while the really important people were given short shrift. But his anger dissipated in a few minutes after the meeting with Daley was hastily arranged by phone from the plane.
In this case, Clinton was correct on the substance. Someone had made a stupid mistake by failing to set up the meeting with Chicago’s most powerful politician, and the Clinton White House was chaotic. But these larger issues were ignored as soon as the president calmed down. It became business as usual.
“There is a certain sort of camaraderie that happens on the plane that leads you to unburden yourself, and I often did that,” Clinton told me in a September 2002 interview. “… And there’s a certain way that people feel freer to say whatever it is they’re thinking when you’re on that plane… . It was like a safe community… . I just had a lot of really, really good conversations that spanned the gamut from what I thought about the players in a given peace process or a conflict to various things about our kids.”
His mood ranged from grand highs to extreme lows. A pet peeve on foreign trips was that his staff would trap him in hours of official meetings when they knew he wanted to participate in events with everyday people or visit cultural sites. He loved museums and historic places, from the Louvre in Paris to the pyramids outside Mexico City, and public markets. “We just spent seven hours in a hotel room,” he once shouted while in Europe. “I could have been in Kansas City!”
“Partly, it was because of his curiosity,” says Sandy Berger, his national security adviser, “partly it was his instinct that appreciating the culture of the place to which you are going is a sign of respect, and he always wanted to do that.”
CLINTON AND HIS TEAM came into office with many lessons to learn. They initially disdained the military, partly because many of them had been antiwar activists in their younger days and few of them had any direct experience with life in the armed forces. “I believe that when they first came in office that the staff looked at the career military as people who couldn’t get jobs on the outside,” says Howie Franklin, a career Air Force noncommissioned officer who rose to chief steward on Air Force One. “… But I saw them change their minds and realize that the professional military person was indeed a professional. The Navy’s running the White House. The Air Force is running Air Force One. The Marine Corps is running Marine One. We were the only guys in town who did what we said we were going to do.”
ONE OF THE MOST embarrassing episodes of his first few months was the “Haircut Incident.” In his motorcade back to the airport after a busy day in Los Angeles, Clinton decided he wanted a haircut from Christophe, the LA-based stylist to Hollywood stars who had also become the president’s favorite “barber.” Aides hastily arranged for the stylist to do the trim aboard the plane, which sat idling on the tarmac while Christophe worked his magic. This postponed Air Force One’s departure. Clinton later said he asked his aides if this would disrupt air traffic, and they said no.
“I think the pilot assured him that it would not be a problem when indeed it obviously was,” said Mack McLarty, then White House chief of staff. “So I think he was probably innocent in terms of intending to inconvenience others, and very, very naïve. But you do rely on what people tell you.” McLarty added that Clinton had made only about a dozen Air Force One trips at that point, so he and his staff were still rookies.
When word reached the media, hell broke loose. It turned out that one of Christophe’s haircuts cost an estimated $200, contradicting Clinton’s self-styled image as a populist. And even though his aides insisted that air traffic was not delayed, other sources said some commercial planes were indeed held up for at least a few minutes. In any case, given the extraordinary security surrounding Air Force One, there was always a good chance that everyday citizens would be inconvenienced, and Clinton should have known better.
“The perception was more powerful than the reality, and the underlying truth—that Clinton had been self-indulgent and insensitive to the image of having a Hollywood hairstylist cut his hair on a busy airport runway, and that his staff had been too stupid to stop it from happening—was bad enough,” said senior Clinton adviser George Stephanopoulos. “The controversy also created new leads for the press, such as, Did the President pay for his pricey haircuts? Finances were Hillary’s department, and her staff said I was supposed to tell reporters that the Clintons had a ‘personal services’ contract with Christophe. Oh, that’ll help. Naturally, they wanted to see the contract, which nobody would give me—because it probably didn’t exist.”
When the new administration fired seven key members of the White House Travel Office for alleged accounting irregularities a short time later, on May 19, things got worse. These people had been responsible for taking care of the media on the road, and they were popular with the press corps. Now it appeared that Clinton cronies, including his distant cousin Catherine Cornelius and his entertainment-industry pal Harry Thomason, were maneuvering to take over the operation. Suddenly it looked like Clinton not only was a hypocrite but had declared war on the press.
The furor eventually died down, but at considerable cost to the president’s image. From then on, Clinton and his staff tried to think very seriously about everything they did on the plane, to avoid more embarrassments.
TIME AND AGAIN, CLINTON used Air Force One to decompress after pressure-packed events. At the end of long trips, he would venture into the staff compartments, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, an unlit cigar clamped between his teeth, with his eyeglasses perched at the end of his nose, and ask who was available to play a game of hearts, to chat, or to watch a movie. Gene Sperling, his chief White House economic adviser, compared it to college kids after exams—a sort of “after-finals release.”
This sense of decompression prevailed after his first meeting as president with the blustery Russian leader Boris Yeltsin in Vancouver, Canada. At first the two men didn’t get along, largely because Yeltsin felt that Clinton was too young and inexperienced. “He just wasn’t sure that this young president was his equal, and it showed in their general demeanor and exchange,” recalls Mack McLarty. With one day left in their summit, McLarty got together with Russian officials and said surely something could be done to build rapport; there were too many important issues to resolve. The Russians apparently agreed, because the next morning Yeltsin greeted Clinton with a big grin and handshake. “I am ready to get down to business, Beel,” he said. It was the first time he had called his American counterpart by his first name, and the ice was broken.
Just after Air Force One took off and headed home, Clinton summoned McLarty into his cabin. “Mack,” the president said, “I think I’m really beginning to establish relationships with these other world leaders.” McLarty was less impressed. “You’re gaining ground, but you have some more ground to gain,” the chief of staff ventured. They chatted for 20 minutes, during which Clinton expressed intense pleasure that he had made the grade, at least in his own mind. Then Clinton shut the discussion down. “That’s it,” he said. “I’m exhausted and I’ve got to go to sleep.” McLarty left.
That wasn’t the end of the episode. McLarty took his chair next to Secretary of State Warren Christopher in the senior-staff compartment. They ate dinner and each drank a glass of wine, whereupon Christopher fell asleep. By this time it was almost midnight. Then the phone calls began arriving from U.S. officials, who were very upset. It turned out that some of the young president’s off-the-cuff comments to Yeltsin had been translated by local journalists from transcripts made by Russian note-takers; they found that Clinton had made disparaging comments about the Japanese. “You know, sometimes when the Japanese say yes, they really mean no, and vice versa,” Clinton had said.
The story was being spread by the news media, and McLarty woke Christopher up to contain the damage. The secretary of state spent 45 minutes making calls to senior Japanese officials to smooth things over. The officials were quite understanding, and McLarty knocked on the president’s door, entered the cabin, and told him about the ruckus and how it had been “finessed.” Clinton’s reaction: “I didn’t mean it offensively.”
Clearly, the new president’s earlier self-satisfaction had been misplaced. He had a lot to learn about diplomacy.
THE CLINTON TRAITS of brilliance, curiosity, and a willingness to make excuses for himself were on constant display during his airborne adventures. On a long flight in late 1994, after his Democratic party had lost control of Congress, Clinton admitted he was hurt but tried to put it all into perspective. Some of those who listened to him believed he was trying not only to persuade them that things weren’t as bad as they seemed, but to convince himself that he wasn’t the first president to screw up.
He launched into a monologue, several hours long, in which he discussed every president from Lincoln to George Herbert Walker Bush, analyzing what they and their Cabinet officers had done right and wrong. “People were just sort of stupefied by it, both by his knowledge, but also just by his desire to talk,” says David Gergen, a senior adviser to Clinton at the time. “He was nursing the wounds of that defeat in ’94. It was quite an extraordinary performance… . You see those sometimes on these planes. You get a revelation. On the road, on the plane, you get a chance to see a president in a very different way. For many people on the staff there was an intimacy that you didn’t get in the White House.”
Clinton would take “decision memos” aboard the plane—memoranda asking him to check off “approved” or “disapproved” on legislation, regulations, appointments, and other matters. He enjoyed ticking off the appropriate boxes and piling up the forms as evidence of his productivity. At other times, he would work on speeches, rewriting passages in his left-handed “curl.” One could never tell when he would abruptly dismiss aides from his private cabin so he could fall asleep, usually within a few seconds, only to wake from his catnap an hour later and call in advisers for more policy discussions.
Some of his White House aides had a name for the late-night president: “Clinton unplugged.” He looked at Air Force One as a haven where he could operate on his own schedule and in his own manner. Clinton’s wandering eye was a constant fact of life. Nina Burleigh, who covered the White House for Time magazine, related an incident in 1997 when he admired her legs on Air Force One. Writing in Mirabella magazine about Clinton’s sexual allure, Burleigh said it happened when she was playing hearts in the front cabin with the president and his longtime confidant Bruce Lindsey. “The president’s foot lightly, and presumably accidentally, brushed mine once under the table,” she said. “His hand touched my wrist while he was dealing the cards. When I got up and shook his hand at the end of the game, his eyes wandered over to my bike-wrecked, naked legs. And slowly it dawned on me as I walked away: He found me attractive.”
She added: “No doubt the president’s lawyers and spin doctors would say I wishfully imagined that long, appreciative look. But we all know when we’re being ogled.” In a remarkable admission for a journalist, she said she enjoyed the attention and added, “I’d be happy to give him [oral sex] just to thank him for keeping abortion legal.” Apparently, nothing ever came of the incident.
But when Clinton let his guard down at such moments, particularly during his lengthy card games, he revealed himself as he rarely did anywhere else. One of his card-playing buddies said the president wanted to shed his official responsibilities at those times, and be one of the boys, talking about sports, movies, women, and other politicians. And he encouraged good-natured banter. Analyzing an upcoming college basketball game on one flight, an aide heard Clinton pick the University of Arkansas to win and blurted out, “You must be crazy.” Clinton didn’t miss a beat, and argued his case with renewed vigor. “One of his most important traits as president was to let aides disagree with him to his face on policy issues,” says the aide. “And in this case, what he wanted at that moment was not three subservient staffers around him but three friends. He wanted to have a few people to relax with. The president is a human being.”
WHEN HILLARY WAS aboard, Clinton would spend much of his time with her, talking policy or reading quietly, and he was generally subdued. His time with Chelsea, his teenaged daughter, provided special moments for both of them.
“When Chelsea was there, you almost didn’t want to enter his cabin,” recalls Gene Sperling, the chief White House economics adviser who briefed the president often on the plane. He recalled many cases of the two sitting next to each other, reading, or Chelsea sitting on a table with her arm around her dad as they chatted amiably. “They both seemed so happy and serene and proud,” Sperling added.
But when neither Hillary nor Chelsea was aboard, the atmosphere changed. Clinton’s Air Force One became a fun house, especially late at night. Clad in a T-shirt and jeans, the middle-aged president would sometimes hang out with his twentysomething aides, including, over the years, Josh King, Kris Engskov, Steve Goodin, Jeremy Gaines, and Andrew Friendly.
Frequent fliers described the conference room as a sort of recreation center and town hall. The president liked to sit at one end of a long rectangular table where he would hold forth, play cards, or watch a movie—sometimes all three at once, in addition to working out a crossword puzzle. Meanwhile, some of his staffers would be watching the movie or reading at the other end of the table. Often, exhausted aides would be sleeping on one or both of the two long couches at the sides of the room.
One of the young staffers told me: “People like myself would let him regress a little bit. He could get far away from the policy people who would come in and out of his office in the White House. This was his basic chill-out time with young guys, sort of a university crowd. He could get rid of the cares of the world because we could always be relied on to talk about movies, TV shows, and sports. I got my closest exposure to him in that setting as opposed to the White House. I would sit with the president in jeans and a sweatshirt, and certainly very few of the public and very few of the White House staff ever saw that. You heard droplets of conversation, things that he might have said to Chelsea in the living quarters; ‘I feel good’ … ‘I gotta lose a couple of pounds.’ … ‘That was a great golf game but I’m still slicing it.’”
The staff mostly listened, and that was the point.
Clinton loved to keep track of popular culture, especially through movies, even ones that had no redeeming social value. Realizing this, before many long trips, aide Josh King would select 15 or more films from his own collection or bring along classics that he rented at a video store, to supplement the list available on board. The president loved the extra options.
He preferred that aides acquire first-run films without having them censored “for airline use,” as his predecessors had done. He wanted to enjoy the bawdy scenes.
Aides would regularly approach the president’s cabin and hear him laughing uproariously at a film the critics had ripped apart. He enjoyed what aides called cheap-thrills movies, like Die Hard and various Arnold Schwarzenegger flicks. It was mindless entertainment that let him forget his official duties for a while.
Sometimes policy making and show business intersected. En route to Cologne for a series of meetings with other world leaders, Clinton called Sperling into his office. He asked if the United States was doing enough to help Third World nations reduce their financial debts. It turned out that Bono, the Irish rock star, had sent Clinton a number of letters urging him to endorse debt relief, and Clinton wanted more information. After Sperling’s briefing, Clinton was satisfied that his administration was doing as much as it could.
And there were times, however few, when the president schmoozed with the reporters in the rear cabin. As often as not, this tended to backfire when he got too candid or theoretical. On September 22, 1995, as he leaned against a bulkhead in the press compartment, he regaled the journalists with a lengthy monologue about the condition of society, and he said Americans appeared to be in a “funk.” This produced a round of stories comparing his remarks to Jimmy Carter’s infamous speech declaring that the nation was in a malaise. Like Carter, he seemed to be blaming the voters for his own failures.
SOME CLINTON loyalists weren’t always happy with his let-it-all-hang-out approach, including Harold Ickes. As deputy chief of staff, Ickes was a tough-minded New York liberal, but he also had a traditional side. He was, after all, the son of former Interior Secretary and FDR confidant Harold Ickes, who was a stern authority figure.
“It was like being at home with the president,” Ickes recalls. “… I had the feeling once you got in the environment of Air Force One there was a different set of rules. There was much more informality. You did not have to worry about the pesky Fourth Estate lurking around the background. You didn’t have to worry about them snapping a picture of your mouth gaping or something like that. But it was Clinton’s attitude that lent itself to this. I thought that the White House staff was too informal around Bill Clinton. It bothered me. I always made a habit that when he came into a room I would stand up. Most of the staff never bothered to stand up when the president of the United States walked in, and that used to piss me off—seeing George [Stephanopoulos, a senior adviser] sitting there with his fucking feet on the table and [he] would sit that way when Bill Clinton would come in and sit down. But part of that is Clinton, because he is so informal … almost, I think, unpresidential in some sense.”
Leon Panetta, who was one of Clinton’s chiefs of staff, agreed. He said the atmosphere on the plane was too much like a “private club,” especially at the end of long trips when aides would “really let their hair down.” Some would drink too much, some would play music too loud, some would get too raucous; and the staff would sometimes leave the cabins a mess.
“I would be offended because some of the staff people would treat it as just another plane,” Panetta said. “I would have to pull some of the staff people aside and say, ‘Look, dammit, this is the presidency of the United States and you’ve got to behave that way.” His advice was simple: Everything that happens in the White House or on the plane has the potential to appear on the front page of The Washington Post or The New York Times, and everyone had to behave accordingly.
Panetta had another concern, a familiar one over the years of Air Force One travel. “When I first became chief of staff, what I found was that staff were climbing on Air Force One that frankly didn’t have much business being on board. Everybody was able, one way or another, to kind of wheedle through it. So one of the first things we decided was that we had to get very disciplined about who would or who would not go.”
CLINTON GENERALLY MANAGED to compartmentalize his life and focus his energies where he had to, but he found it difficult to pace himself. When his mother died during his first term, Clinton attended the funeral in Arkansas, then left for a long-scheduled trip to Moscow even though he was understandably distraught. He also had to cope with the presence aboard Air Force One of Nightline host Ted Koppel and a film crew, as they prepared a story on the making of a superpower summit.
Clinton talked to Koppel, discussed the Moscow trip in detail with his staff, read a variety of memos designed to prepare him for the visit, and then, as the plane soared over northern Europe, went to his private cabin for some sleep.
He had been resting for two and a half hours when chief steward Howie Franklin slipped into his room. No one else on the staff had the nerve to be the designated “wake-up” caller. Franklin knew the room’s layout by heart, so he walked softly through the darkness to the president’s motionless form. “I go in and lean on him,” Franklin recalls, “and he kind of moaned a little bit—I’m standing over the top of him and he’s nuzzled down underneath these covers. It’s about three o’clock in the morning body time. And I said, ‘Sir, I sure hate to do this.’”
Clinton snapped, “Well, don’t do it.”
Franklin knew the president well enough to resort to good-old-boy language. “Sir,” he said firmly, “it’s time to get your butt up and go to work.”
The president rolled slowly out of bed, and Hillary suddenly came awake in the other bed. “Hillary’s peeking out of the covers with a semi ‘Oh dear’ look on her face,” Franklin recalls. The steward announced firmly that the couple had 90 minutes to get ready before they had to face the Russians and the news media in Moscow.
It didn’t end there. Clinton, as with most presidents, had a valet to pack his clothes but the valet was on a backup plane on this particular trip. Franklin was designated to rummage through the president’s wardrobe to find a specific tie and shoes that Clinton wanted to wear. After the president and the First Lady took showers, he settled on his clothes at the very last minute.
In 1996, Clinton scheduled a two-day trip to Colorado Springs and Billings, Montana, that started at 7 A.M. when Clinton and his senior aides met at the White House Diplomatic Room for a brief discussion of the itinerary. He showed up on time but was extremely grumpy. As everyone knew, he hated early-morning events, and it turned out that he had been up late again the night before, reading and watching TV, so little was accomplished at the briefing.
After the 10-minute Marine One flight to Andrews, Clinton bounded up the stairs of Air Force One, entered his private cabin, and kept to himself for the outbound trip. Upon arrival, he spoke at the Air Force Academy, shook 2,600 hands, and met with federal workers. Flying from Colorado Springs to Billings, he took a nap and fell into a deep sleep. This time it was Ickes’s turn to rouse him, and, wanting to give his boss as much rest as he could, entered the cabin as the plane was making its descent. “Mr. President, we’re starting to land,” Ickes whispered.
Clinton groggily asked for a quick summary of what was coming up, and Ickes told him he had to give a speech—and the event was only six minutes from the airport. The president had been hoping to make some final revisions in his text during the limousine ride, and now he realized there wouldn’t be enough time. “Jesus Christ,” Clinton fumed, “why didn’t you get me up earlier?”
Ickes sputtered that he knew the president was tired, and an angry Clinton sent him away. After hurriedly getting dressed, Clinton kept his arrival hosts waiting for 15 minutes as he reviewed his speech before disembarking. Following the address in a sweltering gym, he met with Native American leaders, had dinner with former governors and policy experts on Western issues, and held a few other private meetings.
After spending the night in Billings, Clinton attended a breakfast meeting the next morning, visited two ranches, held an outdoor roundtable discussion of regional concerns, played golf, was briefed again on local issues by his staff, held another roundtable, and concluded with a lengthy bout of hand shaking as a crowd lingered around him.
By the time the White House group climbed aboard Air Force One late that day, everyone was exhausted except Clinton. As one staffer after another nodded off, he appeared in the doorway to the conference room in jeans and a T-shirt and asked the dreaded question: “Who wants to play hearts?”
His longtime confidant Bruce Lindsey and Roy Romer, then governor of Colorado, dutifully agreed. When Ickes returned from a nap three hours later, as the plane descended into the Washington area, Clinton was analyzing his partners’ hands and giving them tips on how to improve their games. Clinton insisted on playing one more hand before disembarking, played still another hand on Marine One, and got to the White House at 2 A.M., wide awake.
CLINTON WAS AN INVETERATE shopper and gift buyer. On his many trips to foreign cities, he would insist on going to a market or a commercial zone, where he would enter one shop after another looking for prizes he could take home. (He would pay in cash or an aide would submit a credit card and get reimbursed later.)
At some point during nearly every foreign trip, his aides would gather up all the carefully wrapped presents and tchotchkes the president had acquired and unpack them aboard Air Force One. Clinton would proudly review each of his purchases for family members, friends, and staffers, and his aides felt obliged to compliment him on his taste and generosity.
Sometimes an adviser would show off his own purchases, and the president would get envious. One aide remembers him gazing longingly at an Uncle Sam carving.
“Is that mine?” the president said, half joking.
“No sir, that’s my acquisition,” an aide replied.
“Damn, I like that,” Clinton said, and he went looking for something similar at the next stop.
OVER EIGHT YEARS of covering him, I got some revealing glimpses of Clinton aboard the plane.
En route to the funeral of assassinated Israeli leader Yitzhak Rabin, I was a member of the Air Force One press pool. At one point, I found myself in a small compartment in front of the press section writing a report and, when I finished, headed back to the press area. Suddenly I saw the president, wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, walking down the hall. He took me aside and, with tears in his eyes, told me of his broken heart at the death of the Israeli prime minister, whom he considered a mentor and a historic peacemaker. “Thanks for being here,” he said. “He was a great man.”
White House Chief of Staff Panetta, who was on the trip, said: “Not only did he develop a close professional relationship with Rabin, but more importantly, he recognized that Rabin was a powerful force that brought about the agreements that we were able to achieve in the Middle East… . It was President Clinton’s nature to really feel the sense of loss from things like that. He was deeply moved by not only the consequences of that death but what it meant for the future, and that’s what concerned him more than anything.”
Chief steward Tim Kerwin also had a private moment with the grieving president during that trip. At about 2 A.M., Kerwin entered the front galley from a dimly lit corridor where staff members were sleeping, and, a few seconds later, was joined by the president. Clinton sat down and began quoting Bible verses, explaining that it would be next to impossible to understand “where these people are coming from” if one wasn’t familiar with Old Testament accounts of how the Israelites were expelled by the Pharaoh, and how the Palestinians have their own traditional stake in the land claimed by Israel today.
This was the same trip during which House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Clinton’s Republican nemesis, got himself into hot water by complaining that the Clintonites made him leave the plane through the rear exit instead of the front door. Feeling snubbed, Gingrich said he was so upset that he might even prolong a government shutdown that was brewing in a dispute over the funding of Clinton’s policies. Gingrich was pilloried in the media, portrayed as a spoiled brat and a crybaby.
ON A RETURN TRIP from Australia, I found myself the only journalist still awake in the press compartment in the wee hours. I walked to the galley for a soda, and stood in the aisle sipping it and stretching my legs when I heard that distinctive, raspy voice.
“Hey, man, how you doin’?” said the president, standing a foot away. He had eluded or exhausted his handlers and was getting himself a soft drink, obviously wide awake and eager to chat.
I had a decision to make: Let him talk one-on-one, or wake up my fellow reporters, which would destroy the spontaneity of the situation and maybe even chase the president back up front. So I opted to let everyone sleep and go with the flow. Clinton proceeded to chitchat for 15 minutes. There was nothing earthshaking (I later briefed the other journalists about what he had said), but his musings provided fascinating insight into his natural curiosity. He talked about holding koalas, of cradling baby kangaroos, of the rain forests, and the deserts of Australia. He gave a detailed explanation of the ecology of the Great Barrier Reef, then effused about how he had gone snorkeling the previous afternoon. “I swam over a giant clam,” he said. “It was huge!”
• • •
“WE HAD QUITE a lot of eventful decisions that had to be made on Air Force One,” Clinton told me in a recent interview.
In May 1995, he was flying to Ukraine, a former Soviet republic, and was told of a serious security threat. Russian intelligence had passed along to the CIA word that rebels in the region were well armed, possibly with handheld missiles, and might make an attempt on the president’s life. The threat had been confirmed by the CIA. The question was whether Clinton should cancel his scheduled visit to Babi Yar, site of a mass grave where the Nazis had buried 100,000 of their murder victims, many of them Jewish, during World War II.
Clinton talked about it at great length, and decided to take the chance. The outdoor event went off without a hitch, but several senior staffers who had participated in the final discussion aboard Air Force One were jumpy. Every time something crunched under foot, McLarty, wearing big galoshes to prevent him from slipping on the pathway, would look up suddenly, expecting to see an incoming missile.
EVEN MORE HARROWING was Clinton’s trip to Islamabad, Pakistan, in March 2000. For weeks prior to departure, the Secret Service warned the White House that the situation would be extremely dangerous. The early plan was for Clinton to leave India for a quick trip to the Pakistani capital to meet with General Pervez Musharraf, the country’s ruler. As U.S. intelligence picked up more and more signs of a possible attack against the president, the Secret Service finally recommended in the strongest terms that the visit be scrapped. “They were really freaked out,” recalls Sandy Berger, Clinton’s national security adviser. “… They were adamant about not going to Islamabad.”
But Berger and other foreign-policy specialists felt that meeting with Musharraf would be valuable. For one thing, every American president was expected to visit Pakistan for every time he visited India, its traditional rival. Second, there were important issues to discuss, from nuclear nonproliferation to India-Pakistan relations to Pakistan’s role in fighting terrorism. Finally, no one wanted the public to think the president was afraid to travel.
Secret Service officials persisted, arguing that there were many terrorists in and around Pakistan, including operatives of al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden (who would later orchestrate the attacks of September 11, 2001). They would like nothing better than to knock a president from the sky. The landing and takeoff at the Islamabad airport would be especially perilous because terrorists could hide in the surrounding hills and fire at Air Force One with handheld, ground-to-air missiles. The Secret Service also expressed grave doubts about trusting the Pakistani military with secret information about the president’s itinerary and the plans to protect him. “The threat was not abstract,” Berger recalls. “It was real intelligence. It was the only time that I really thought during the eight years (of Clinton’s presidency) that something might happen.” At one point, a senior agent said he would resign if the president went to Pakistan. (He would later relent.)
At a final Oval Office meeting with Berger, Secret Service leaders, and other U.S. officials, all the arguments were presented again. The Secret Service’s chief representative said, “We cannot guarantee that we can protect you in this environment. Ultimately, it’s your decision.”
Clinton looked at his foreign-policy advisers and paused. Then, in a rare case of a president overruling the Secret Service, he announced that the reasons for going outweighed the risks, and he would make the trip. He said he was glad his wife, Hillary, would not be on the journey but realized his daughter, Chelsea, would be accompanying him. “We’ll go,” the president said. “But I don’t want Chelsea to be on this leg.”
Then he turned to his national security adviser. “Okay, Berger,” he joked. “You think this is such a good idea, you’re coming with me.” Berger smiled weakly.
Departing from India, the Americans used a ruse to confuse would-be attackers. The original plan was to have two cargo planes on the tarmac in Bombay before departure to Pakistan. The president was to board one of them, then walk out a different door, and board a smaller C20 corporate-style jet holding 20 passengers. But this plan was scrapped when White House Press Secretary Joe Lockhart pointed out that since the press contingent was to travel on one of those cargo planes, it might look as if the media were being used as a decoy.
What actually happened was that Clinton walked to the door of one military cargo jet and shook hands with well-wishers but never got on. He hustled around the front of the plane to board an unmarked, white Air Force C20, out of sight of reporters and spectators. As an added precaution, several other decoy planes made the flight. The hour-long trip was nerve-wracking; the Americans used gallows humor to relieve the tension, asking each other if their life insurance was paid up. But since the exact time and place of the president’s arrival were not known to the Pakistanis, the Secret Service thought they had surprise on their side. Still, the pilot zoomed from 10,000 feet to the tarmac in 12 seconds, to avoid being an easy target.
The press contingent aboard its cargo plane had more of a problem than the journalists ever knew. U.S. military spotters thought they saw a flash on the ground—possibly evidence of a ground-to-air missile that had just been launched. This was immediately relayed to the pilot, who released “countermeasures”—airborne decoys designed to divert incoming missiles. To this day, no one can be sure what was actually seen, possibly the sun glinting off a metal surface in a field below the cargo plane. But no one was taking any chances that day.
The president’s departure from Islamabad a few hours later was the next challenge. By that point, it was clear where Clinton was, and his takeoff route could be easily predicted. Once the American party was aboard, they were told to immediately take their seats and, as they strapped themselves in, the jet began gaining speed along the runway. “It felt like we were going straight up in the air,” says Berger. “We went, foof! and you could actually feel the pressure and the force on your body.”
After a few seconds, the small cabin filled with relieved chatter. As the plane left Pakistan air space, Berger called Larry Cockrell, chief of the president’s Secret Service detail who was still on the ground, and said, “We’re out of Pakistan, Larry. You can get out of the bathroom.” Cockrell laughed, not so much at Berger’s joke but because the ordeal was over.
Clinton later told me: “That’s the only time I really thought we were, based on the intelligence I’d seen, at some significant risk. But I had no question that I should be doing it. The only thing I hated was putting those pilots and other aides [at risk]—you know, people that served us, that worked in the mess, and my young staff members, I didn’t like the idea. I just wished that somehow that I could have magically gone by myself.”
Such a thing is never possible for the commander in chief.
A PARTICULARLY REVEALING moment was Clinton’s decision to send armed federal agents to seize a 6-year-old Cuban refugee named Elian Gonzalez from his relatives in Miami. The boy had left Cuba with his mother in a desperate seaborne escape attempt that ended in the mother’s death. But Elian was taken in by relatives in Miami, and a dramatic legal struggle ensued when his father in Cuba, who had been estranged from his mother, sued to win his return.
The struggle put the Clinton administration in a quandary. Clinton didn’t want to alienate the politically powerful Cuban-American community in South Florida, which wanted Elian to remain with his American relatives. Opposition from Cuban Americans could cost Vice President Al Gore key support in Florida in the 2000 election. But at the same time, the law and common sense seemed to favor returning the boy to his father. Complicating matters was the fact that Attorney General Janet Reno, who would have to enforce whatever decision was made, was from Miami and hoped to run for governor of Florida.
Elian had been living with his Miami relatives for weeks when the issue reached the boiling point. The Clinton administration decided that, by law, he had to join his father back in Cuba, but his Miami relatives refused to surrender him. This produced fierce demonstrations and increasing pressure in Miami for a resolution that would keep the boy in the United States. “We were trying to find a time to get Reno and the president together,” recalls former White House press secretary Joe Lockhart.
On April 5, 2000, en route to Washington after the dedication of a memorial for bombing victims in Oklahoma City, Chief of Staff John Podesta decided it was time to make the final decision.
Halfway home on Air Force One, Clinton asked Reno to come to his airborne office. Clinton was wearing his blue “commander in chief” windbreaker and he was playing a jazz CD. Reno walked somberly into the cabin and took a seat in the leather-upholstered chair across from the president’s wraparound desk, to his left. Lockhart sat to Clinton’s right. Deputy Chief of Staff Steve Ricchetti sat on the floor, a casual gesture he hoped would relax everyone.
But the tension was thick. Reno knew that she was expected to bring up the Elian case, and she did, in an unexpectedly emotional way. The laconic and usually stoic attorney general said she was torn about the case and after 10 minutes she started to weep. Twisting her gangly, 6-foot-1 frame in the chair uncomfortably, she talked about how wonderful Miami was, how many friends she still had there, and how much she wanted to move back after her time was up in Washington. Yet she said her friends were deeply split about what to do with the sweet-looking little boy from Cuba. “Things are so divided,” Reno said amid sobs.
Having a Cabinet member break down was awkward enough. But Clinton never had a close relationship with Reno; far from it. He considered her too independent from the White House and altogether too unpredictable. Making things even more discomfiting was Clinton’s hearing problem. Even though she had pushed her chair to the edge of the president’s desk, her voice dropped to a whisper and more than once he had to ask her to repeat herself.
Clinton let her go on for another 10 minutes, then said quietly, “This must be hard for you.” (He later told aides he wondered how he would have felt if he had been president during the school integration crisis in Little Rock, Arkansas, his hometown, a generation earlier. That would have torn him up, too, he said.) But now it was time to decide.
“We need to bring this to a conclusion,” Clinton said, noting that the controversy over Elian had dragged on for too many weeks. “But,” he added, “I have some concerns that this be done properly.” He was worried that someone would get hurt in any raid to snatch the child from his relatives. But that seemed to be the better of the two choices available. The other was to keep negotiating even though all sides were hardening their positions. It quickly became clear that Clinton had lost patience with that approach because it was making him look vacillating and weak.
Reno agreed that a raid could be dangerous; intelligence sources said some people in the house where Elian was being held were armed. Clinton insisted, again, that it was time to act, and he told her to proceed with the raid. In fact, it was conducted efficiently and with no injuries, but it spawned even more criticism from Cuban Americans who said Clinton and Reno had betrayed the little boy. It also would hurt Vice President Al Gore’s 2000 presidential campaign in Florida, quite possibly costing him the state and the White House. But the special atmosphere of Air Force One had helped bring everyone to the decision point.
“I can’t imagine they would have had that conversation about Miami in the Oval Office,” Lockhart told me later. “It wouldn’t have seemed appropriate. There’s an atmosphere somewhere between casualness and intimacy on that plane.”
ANOTHER IMPORTANT DECISION on Air Force One was Clinton’s order to bomb Iraq during the impeachment crisis in December 1998. En route home from a trip to Israel, Clinton considered an attack on Iraq because Saddam Hussein was again balking at allowing United Nations weapons inspections. “We knew there would be screaming about the decision,” Lockhart recalls, because it could so easily be seen as an attempt to divert attention from the impeachment crisis and possibly sway votes in the House by showing that Clinton was an effective commander in chief.
About two hours after the start of the 12-hour flight, Clinton made the decision to strike. National Security Adviser Berger and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright sat with him in his office as he talked by secure phone to other members of his senior staff, including Gore and Defense Secretary Bill Cohen. Everyone recommended an attack.
White House adviser Doug Sosnik and Lockhart were sitting on the couches in the corridor outside the president’s office when Berger emerged and told them that military action was approved. “Okay,” he added, “how are we going to explain this?”
Lockhart replied, “It’ll be tough, but if we don’t strike Iraq because of the political situation, it’ll be worse.”
Sosnik agreed. As Lockhart recalled later, “Everybody came to the conclusion they were going to criticize us no matter what we did, so we ought to do what was right.”
Hundreds of cruise missiles struck Baghdad on December 16, and the House, after delaying its final debate by one day, impeached Clinton December 19.
ON THE LIGHTER SIDE, Clinton’s vanity would clearly emerge on the plane. He thought he looked cool in casual clothes, so he would wear jeans and a sweatshirt or T-shirt as often as he could. Trouble was, they made him look overweight and undignified, but the staff didn’t have the heart to tell him.
As an aging baby boomer, he hated to admit that his hearing had faded over the years; he attributed it to listening to too much loud rock ’n’ roll music in his youth. At first, his aides were perplexed that he preferred to make phone calls when he landed rather than on the plane, which seemed more convenient. Then they realized he simply couldn’t hear phone conversations very well. The plane may have state-of-the-art acoustics, but it was still difficult for a hearing-impaired person like Clinton to pick up every word.
“The communications on the plane were terrible,” says Sandy Berger. “It drove him crazy and it drove me crazy. There were secure ‘coms’ on the plane and there was always a backlog of calls involving foreign leaders, returning calls or making calls… . The phone system on Air Force One was so bad and the disconnect rate was so high that he would be truly embarrassed when he was on the phone with a foreign leader and it would be like when you get your cellphone and you hit a patch and suddenly you can’t hear. Here was the president of the United States, leader of the greatest nation, and he can’t make a phone connection!”
The problem, which remains today, is not with making regular phone calls from the plane, which can been done easily and with good quality. The problem comes with secure communications, which involve patching calls through encryption systems and scrambling devices. That takes time, and the quality of the connections is often primitive. In the end, White House aides agreed that the president was right to discourage important phone calls on the plane because this secure communications system, coupled with his hearing problem, could have easily caused serious misunderstandings.
Clinton also loved to play jazz and rock ’n’ roll CDs in his private cabin. Among his favorite artists were B. B. King, Wynton Marsalis, and various gospel choirs. Trouble was, he didn’t use earphones and just turned the music up to such a high volume that his aides would have trouble hearing him when they entered the compartment. He would do the same thing in the staff cabin when he played the card game of hearts. He liked to have the music blaring as he played hand after hand and held forth on one topic after another, always the center of attention. More than one staff member begged off from the card game with a headache.
“We never had a president who listened to a lot of music before Clinton,” says former chief steward Howie Franklin. “But here’s a musician [a longtime saxophone player] who comes along. And he wants to listen to music on a regular basis and we found out that if he listens to music in his stateroom [on the internal Air Force One sound system] you would have to listen to the same music that he’s listening to in the back… . We’re talking about rock ’n’ roll, like the Four Tops, and sixties and seventies rock ’n’ roll… . And he’d like to crank it up. So we went out and bought him a CD player that he could carry with him. And then he would listen to it in the stateroom and we had two of them so he could bring it off the airplane because that’s how much he liked listening to music.”
The stereotype was true that Clinton loved junk food, especially hamburgers and fries from McDonald’s. But over time his eating habits changed, especially after he damaged his knee on March 14, 1997, in a fall at the Florida home of golfer Greg Norman. His doctor and physical therapist told him that such an injury often caused patients to stop exercising and gain weight. Since Clinton was already miffed at all the “fat jokes” told at his expense, he took their advice to work out on an exercise bike and cut down on calories. His meals on Air Force One improved: He often ate veggie burgers, salads, and roast chicken, all specially prepared in the senior-staff galley at midships. The rest of the passengers routinely ate more standard (and less nutritious) fare.
• • •
IN MANY WAYS, the end of the 1996 reelection campaign was the high point of Clinton’s eight years on Air Force One.
For one thing, everyone at the White House seemed euphoric as it became increasingly clear that Clinton would be the first Democratic president since Franklin Roosevelt elected to a second term. The crowds were big and enthusiastic, and Clinton was enjoying himself immensely.
Mark Penn, Clinton’s pollster and one of his senior political advisers, was on the plane for virtually every trip in the two months leading up to the election. “The days never ended,” Penn told me. “… We’d try to hit as many cities as possible. The question was, how do you continue to do all your work when the plane would stop, everybody would get off, you’d load into a motorcade, go see 20,000 people, and get back on? The work part of the day was always the first part of the day, because you had to make sure you were clear on where the messages were, what the speech was going to be, what else was going to happen… .
“We were essentially the flying campaign. All of the media message decisions were really being made on the plane… . If you think of a typical day, maybe the president had done some exercise but essentially you’d have a speech prep in the morning on the plane and go through what the events were, what the messages were, what the policy issues were. Something else could be happening that day but you’d assume if you were traveling for an hour and a half, he might spend a half hour alone, a half hour on other business, and a half hour of campaign-related stuff … what [Republican challenger Bob] Dole’s up to, what the overnight polls are showing, and what we need to do today.”
Sometimes, the president and his brain trust would sit in the conference room or in his private office and watch suggested TV ads. He would accept or reject them on the spot, and sometimes make alterations. And within a 48-hour time span, sometimes less, the group would decide his itinerary for the next few days. “We could decide that we were going to show up in any community in America,” Penn said. Local TV stations would track the plane for 20 minutes prior to its arrival, carrying the landing live. Clinton and his staff would frequently watch the coverage in his cabin.
On the last leg of the campaign—from a final rally in South Dakota to Little Rock, Arkansas—at about 2 A.M. Election Day, a party atmosphere prevailed. Clinton, surrounded by two dozen jubilant aides in the conference room, had changed into casual clothes, sat down at the head of the table, and started his customary card game. Suddenly, he turned to Penn and said jovially: “Okay, Mark, so what’s going to be the final prediction?”
Penn, who had just reviewed his final polls, said Clinton would win with 49 percent to Dole’s 41, and the remainder for liberal insurgent Ralph Nader and minor candidates. This turned out to be true, but it wasn’t what Clinton wanted to hear. He had been eager to break the 50 percent mark so he would not go down in history as a “minority president.” Disappointment flashed in the president’s eyes, the room quieted down, and Clinton returned to his card game.
HIS SECOND TERM held the potential for some historic achievements, such as reform of Social Security and Medicare. But Clinton’s personal appetites got the best of him.
Previous presidents had had their share of sexual liaisons, but the media kept them quiet. The media during Clinton’s era had become more salacious and graphic, and his adversaries were bent on his political destruction—so his affair with former White House intern Monica Lewinsky almost led to his removal from office. Beyond that, his misbehavior and subsequent lies resulted in a squandered year of his presidency and a fiasco for the nation to endure. He was able to compartmentalize the scandal, and continued to work hard on policy issues, even if little was accomplished.
Air Force One provided a window on the sordid mess, particularly after Clinton was forced to admit his sins publicly on August 17, 1998. The next day, the president went off to what had been billed as a family vacation at Martha’s Vineyard. As Bill, Hillary, and Chelsea Clinton made their way from the Diplomatic Entrance across the White House lawn to Marine One on the way to Air Force One, it was clear how strained their relationship was. Clinton managed a weak smile for the TV cameras as he walked, holding the leash of Buddy, his new chocolate-colored Labrador. Hillary stared firmly into the distance as she walked awkwardly at his side. Between them, tightly grasping each of their hands, was their 18-year-old daughter, Chelsea, as a sort of human link holding together their troubled marriage. As they stepped into the helicopter, Hillary walked brusquely past her husband as he tried to assist her by holding her right elbow.
Once aboard, the president held on to Buddy and scarcely looked at his wife. “It was clear that there was a lot of reckoning ahead in that family,” said one of their flying companions. The silence was so uncomfortable and the moment so poignant that press secretary Mike McCurry at one point said awkwardly, “So, I’ve never been to Martha’s Vineyard, what should we do?” Chelsea, as embarrassed as everyone else, started to talk about the beaches and the restaurants, but it did little to relieve the tension.
When they reached Andrews Air Force Base, they found not the big 747, or the backup 707, but a much smaller C9, a twin-engine executive-style government jet that was small enough to land on the airstrip of the New England resort. Just before they arrived, Kris Engskov, the president’s personal aide, rushed into the front section and turned that day’s newspapers over so the banner headlines on the front pages, screaming “Lewinsky,” wouldn’t generate another moment of embarrassment to the first family.
They had no private compartment. Clinton sat in the first row of the forward section with a national-security aide. Hillary and Chelsea sat in the row behind them, chatting quietly. The rear section, open to the front, held staff and Secret Service agents, and a handful of journalists. The first family was clearly visible to everyone in the plane if they stood up or moved about.
The unhappy couple made the hour-long ride largely in silence, as Chelsea made small talk with those around her. For a while, Mrs. Clinton slept as the president read The General, a military novel by Patrick A. Davis. He also worked on The New York Times crossword puzzle and at one point turned to McCurry with a laugh as he pointed to 46 down, “meal for the humble” in four letters. The answer was “crow,” and Clinton said, “Here’s one that’s appropriate for today.” McCurry managed a weak laugh. Tim Kerwin, the normally talkative chief steward, stayed mum, fearing he might say something wrong.
This was the same weekend that Clinton was secretly planning to strike against suspected al Qaeda terrorists in Sudan and Afghanistan, and he briefly returned to Washington to supervise the air raids the next day. White House officials later told me that Hillary Clinton, knowing of the imminent military operation, decided not to quiz her husband on the Lewinsky affair or his testimony before a grand jury because she realized the pressure he was under. “She basically said we’re not going to deal with this until you do what you have to do,” recounted a senior White House aide at the time. “She had some appreciation that he was under an enormous amount of stress.”
The August 20 attacks were criticized as an attempt to divert attention from Clinton’s personal woes, just as his missile attacks on Baghdad the following December would be criticized for the same reason. And they did bear an eerie similarity to Wag the Dog, a movie that summer about a president who creates a phony war to distract attention from a sex scandal. But the attacks failed to kill terrorist leader Osama bin Laden, just as the president’s personal campaign failed to heal his troubled marriage that weekend.
IN HIS FINAL DAYS as president, Clinton had a hard time letting go. He got little sleep as he sorted through papers and memorabilia, signed executive orders, created eight new national monuments, nominated nine federal judges, approved hundreds of new federal regulations, and, most controversial, granted 140 pardons and worked out a deal with a special prosecutor to drop the criminal case against him for lying under oath about having sex with Monica Lewinsky.
His last trip on Air Force One was a sentimental journey to Little Rock, Arkansas, where he had gotten his start in politics. He walked the length of the plane, inspected the cabins, the galley, and the conference rooms, and even paid a visit to the press compartment. “You got anybody you want to pardon?” he quipped. “Everybody in America either wants somebody pardoned or a national monument.”
After the inauguration of his successor, he spent two hours at Andrews Air Force Base saying good-bye to all comers. “When you leave the White House,” he declared, “you wonder if you’ll ever draw a crowd again.” Then he boarded the 747 and began his new life. En route to his new residence in New York, he took a brief nap and began still another round of farewells with the crew. “It was really emotional because it was so short,” Clinton told me. “You know, you couldn’t watch a movie or play a game or pretend it wasn’t happening. It was going to be over in a minute.”
At that point, the aircraft was no longer called Air Force One because the designation is only used for planes carrying the president. It was now Special Air Mission 28000. After taking William Jefferson Clinton to New York, the plane returned to Washington, ready to serve the 43rd president, George W. Bush.