Chapter Thirty-two

AFRICAN JOURNEY

The capital of Ghana is a reliably sweltering locale. Accra is on the Atlantic, just north of the equator, with humidity that hovers in the high nineties even as the temperature often soars to the low hundreds. For Clinton, in March 1998, such a climate seemed rather appealing compared to the fevers of Washington.

Clinton’s journey to Africa in the first week of spring was not in response to the Lewinsky explosion. It had been planned long before as a centerpiece of the second term. Indeed, Clinton had been yearning to visit sub-Saharan Africa since he was a boy. Still, as Kenneth Starr’s investigation had settled into what promised to be a long sullen phase of daily trench warfare, the president and a large delegation were happy to leave a gossipy, hyperventilating capital and take refuge on a world stage. This was a trip quite unlike any predecessor had taken. Clinton was now taking the longest trip of his presidency—six nations in eleven days—on an itinerary designed to highlight progress and potential in a continent that tended to make news in America only for its horrors.

The stop in Ghana was to celebrate President Jerry Rawlings, a former dictator who twice came to power in coups but then led his country to democracy. On Accra’s Independence Square, the visiting president was greeted almost as if he were the Messiah. The crowd had begun gathering at 5 a.m., even while Air Force One was far over the Atlantic, and by the time Clinton arrived there were hundreds of thousands of people in wait; it was by several times the largest crowd ever to greet Bill Clinton. The heat was unbearable for the visitors, including Clinton, whose face turned beet red as his clothes became drenched with sweat. Even many Ghanaians collapsed in the tightly packed throng. Those still standing could not hear much; the outdoor sound system was tinny and could not carry. But few people cared. People craned their necks and jumped up, or created human towers just for a glimpse of Clinton. This friendly scene turned briefly menacing when Clinton stepped down to do what he always did at the end of speeches, shake hands along the security line separating the crowd from the stage. The crowd surged. Suddenly, a woman steps from the president was being crushed between people and a fence. Fearing he was about to witness a tragedy, Clinton shouted angrily to the mob, “Get back! Back off!”

It was a long minute of chaos before the crowd was subdued, and the woman was saved. Afterward the president was exhilarated, telling aides what a fabulous morning it had been. At home, Clinton was being systematically disrobed in the most personally embarrassing investigation in American political history. Here, he was revered. The throbbing mass of Ghanaians understood that in taking this trip, Clinton was showing himself as a different kind of leader, possessed of a larger vision, who wanted to take American diplomacy—and America’s reputation among common folk around the world—in new directions.

For much of the past year, as Clinton had been trying to lead a “national conversation” on race relations, he and his staff had been wrestling with the question of whether the president, on behalf of the nation, should issue an apology to African-Americans for slavery. Some black leaders had been pushing for such a symbolic gesture. Others were demanding more than symbolism, calling for financial reparations to the descendants of slaves. Clinton ultimately decided against such an apology, judging that it might be divisive rather than unifying. The Africa trip, however, presented a related question: How should the United States recognize and express remorse for its role in the slave trade? The discussion of whether and where to make some carefully modulated statement was still going on while the trip was under way.

Then, Clinton simply preempted the issue. In the village of Mukono, Uganda, after watching schoolchildren perform a charming dance with colored scarves and listening to Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni recite in a long speech Africa’s troubled history, Clinton plunged into the issue extemporaneously. “Going back to the time before we were even a nation, European Americans received the fruits of the slave trade,” he said. “And we were wrong in that.” Warming to his subject, Clinton continued, “Perhaps the worst sin America ever committed about Africa was the sin of neglect and ignorance. We have never been as involved with you, in working together for our mutual benefit, for your children and for ours, as we should have been.”

Reactions at home and in Africa varied toward the president’s comment, a division that paralleled how people reacted to Clinton generally. Skeptics heard Clinton preening for acclaim with words that sounded brave but were actually empty. Admirers found an appealing modesty and candor in his words, reflecting Clinton’s instinct for human connection.

The next stop took him to a place where a great crime was more recent, and Clinton’s own connection to events was more direct.

Rwanda, the scene of a genocide just four years earlier, had not been on the itinerary as White House planners originally conceived the trip. But as the president’s departure loomed, they reconsidered. On a trip to Africa, how could he credibly avert his gaze from such a recent horror?

His visit to this blood-soaked nation lasted just three hours. Air Force One landed at the same airport President Juvenal Habyarimana’s plane was approaching when it was shot down in 1994, the start of the killing. Clinton did not leave the airport grounds at Kigali. Instead, he and Hillary Clinton walked across the tarmac to an airport lounge. Inside were several dozen people—friendly, welcoming faces, just as he had seen elsewhere on the trip. A closer look revealed more. Many had visible scars or missing limbs. The Clintons sat beside each other in gold-upholstered armchairs. He sipped a can of Diet Coke. Then, for the next hour, he listened.

He heard the story of Gloriosa Uwimpuhwe. Her father and mother had been killed, she explained calmly. So had four of her siblings.

He listened to Josephine Murebwayire. Her family had taken refuge with hundreds of others in a Catholic seminary. The Hutu soldiers dragged them outside and began swinging their machetes. She was badly cut. Her husband, two brothers, and six children were all killed. “Thank you,” the president whispered when she finished speaking.

There was Venuste Karasira, who had fled with some four thousand others to a local college where they had been told that United Nations peacekeepers would protect them. When the U.N. forces left, fearing for their own safety, a wild gang rampaged through, killing all but four hundred people. “I lost my right hand,” Karasira said. “We died because we were left by the United Nations soldiers.” Clinton swallowed but said nothing. He simply nodded for the next speaker to begin.

Probably no other president had ever confronted the consequences of his decisions—or, in this case, his non-decisions—on such intimate grounds. After this wrenching session adjourned, Clinton addressed a larger group of Rwandans. He said he accepted his share of responsibility for not intervening in the most rapid “slaughter in this blood-filled century we are about to leave.” Never, he said, should the “international community” have dithered in rhetorical debate about whether the killing amounted to “genocide.” The pace of killing with machine guns and machetes, he noted, was “five times as fast as the mechanized gas chambers used by the Nazis.

“It may seem strange to you here,” he said, “but all over the world there were people like me sitting in offices, day after day, who did not fully appreciate the depth and speed with which you were being engulfed in this unimaginable terror.”

This was a questionable assertion. The scale of the killing, if not the precise numbers, was available to any subscriber of the New York Times. Intervention was never on the table. The terror might have been unimaginable, but so too, in 1994, was the notion that the United States would commit its military forces in far-off Africa to stop it. This visit, Clinton later told friends, was the most emotionally searing moment of his presidency.

The next stop was South Africa, where Clinton was confronted again with the unpleasant task of balancing affairs of high state in the midst of a low-minded scandal. At his hotel in Cape Town, the president grimaced sadly as he sat with aides to run down the list of Lewinsky questions that might come up at a news conference later that day with President Nelson Mandela. The brave and long-suffering Mandela, imprisoned for two decades during the long struggle against apartheid, was the world leader Clinton respected more than any other. To stand beside this heroic figure, only to be peppered with questions about an investigation into sex and perjury, was beyond humiliation. Mercifully, there were no questions about the Lewinsky matter at the news conference. It was as if Mandela’s luminescent presence had an inhibiting effect on the traveling press. Without prompting, though, Mandela made what some interpreted as a glancing reference to the ugly matter brewing in Washington. The South African said President Clinton and his wife “have the correct instincts on the major international questions facing the world today,” and added pointedly, “I fully accept his integrity and his bona fides.”

One potentially awkward aspect of the Africa trip turned out not to be a problem at all. To the vast relief of their traveling aides, Bill and Hillary Clinton seemed to be getting along fine. Even before the scandal broke, this was often not the case during foreign travel. Hillary Clinton was often crabby when accompanying her husband abroad, or so it seemed to his aides. She loved travel, but did not like the second-fiddle role that was inevitably assigned to her when she traveled with him. Her own foreign trips were impressively substantive. On presidential travel, by contrast, she was at the mercy of his schedule, and was subjected to all manner of teas, receptions, and other ceremonial functions. On this trip, however, she was a useful guide for her husband. She had already visited many of the African cities and countries they were stopping in, and local officials and activists greeted her like an old friend.

There was even a mini-vacation for the first family built into this trip. For two days in Botswana, the Clintons dropped most of their traveling delegation in the capital, Gaborone, and flew several hundred miles north to the Chobe National Game Park. They spent a magical time together on safari, seeing hippos and lions and a pair of elephants. They snuggled together on a boat ride as the sun set on the Chobe River. No matter the storms back home, the pleasure they took in each other’s company was plain.

It was at a presidential appearance in Botswana that one member of Clinton’s traveling party ventured to try a local specialty: boiled worms. With a gaggle of reporters and locals looking on, White House press secretary Michael McCurry popped one in his mouth and announced, “Tastes like a dead worm.”

This was a typical moment of whimsy for Clinton’s spokesman. When he took the job in January 1995, his mission was to open the windows on what had become a fetid relationship between Clinton and the Washington news media. “I want to have some fun around here,” he announced. Once he showed up in the White House briefing room with a paper bag over his head and announced that he was an “anonymous official.” Another time he jumped, fully clothed, into a fancy swimming pool at a Democratic fund-raiser on a $100 bet.

The press secretary was not a Clinton intimate. To the contrary, both the president and first lady well remembered that he had worked in the 1992 primaries for Bob Kerrey, who had gotten personal toward the end of his failed bid. McCurry was eventually welcomed into the West Wing, where people appreciated his poise at the podium and his sound judgment about communication strategy. But he never made it—or tried to make it—into Clinton’s inner circle. There was always an unspoken reserve between them. Clinton had a keen intuition, and he seemed to separate people into those who were with him as a job and those who were with him in their hearts. McCurry was in the first category. Now, three years after taking his post, his goals of having more fun and forging a happier relationship between the president and his press corps were in a shambles.

He was bitter about it. A veteran Washington operative, McCurry had grown up with a respectful view of reporters. He longed for the old-school days of hard-drinking, card-playing hacks who worked hard to get important stories but did not try to get on television and had no interest in a politician’s sex life. The new breed of reporters, he complained often to his West Wing colleagues and to the reporters directly, were a preening bunch, who substituted a pose of sneering cynicism for professionalism and genuine tough-mindedness. McCurry was uniformly described in newspaper profiles and Washington chatter as “a nice guy”—true words in normal times—but in these feverish days the description did not always apply. He had turned belligerent almost daily in his telephone calls with reporters, indignantly refusing to answer questions or sometimes even listen to them, and demanding to speak with editors. One night on the Africa trip, at an off-the-record dinner with reporters, he reduced a network correspondent to tears with an angry attack on her coverage.

McCurry’s job might have been easier that year if he could have retreated into blind support for Clinton. But that was not his feeling, either. The president’s behavior with Lewinsky—whatever the details of the relationship—plainly had been egregious. It put the press secretary in a ludicrous position when each day he had to stand at the podium and repeat the official line that nothing improper had happened when it was clear that something had. Shortly before the Africa trip, he got sent to the doghouse for stating the obvious in an unguarded moment to the Chicago Tribune: “Maybe there’ll be a simple, innocent explanation. I don’t think so, because I think we would have offered that up already.”

McCurry was angry at Clinton for acting rashly. He was angry at the White House lawyers, who were hoarding information and sending him out to deliver increasingly lame talking points. He was angry at reporters for their relentless small-mindedness. This genial professional was the embodiment of how frayed Washington relationships had become in this age of scandal.

The Africa trip came to an exhausted and ecstatic conclusion on April 1 in Dakar, Senegal. The president was finishing up an interview with ABC’s Sam Donaldson when White House aides got word from Washington that presidential attorney Robert Bennett was eager to talk to Clinton the moment the interview was over. Bennett represented Clinton in the Paula Jones case. For once, urgent news on this subject actually meant good news. In Little Rock, federal judge Susan Webber Wright had dismissed Jones’s lawsuit—the very one in which Clinton was asked under oath about Monica Lewinsky, and the precipitating event for Starr’s perjury investigation. “Is this an April Fool’s joke?” an elated Clinton asked Bennett. Not a chance, the lawyer replied. Still incredulous, the president called back ten minutes later just to be sure.

Top aides immediately sent word down through the ranks: no gloating. The decision was to be acknowledged with quiet solemnity. One person did not get the word. Clinton himself was ecstatic. That night in his Dakar hotel, after Hillary Clinton and Chelsea went to bed, he popped an unlit cigar in his mouth and surveyed a room full of gift merchandise that local officials had arranged for sale to the presidential delegation in a top-floor suite. Whimsically, Clinton picked up a drum and began banging good-naturedly on it as he stood near the balcony door—near enough that a Fox News camera crew captured his impolitic celebration from the parking lot below.

Clinton was happy because, as the New York Times wrote in its news pages the next day, “While the relentless machinery of investigation may grind on for many months, it is now politically inconceivable that Congress will consider impeachment—for President Clinton’s alleged lies and obstruction in a case that no longer exists.” This was indeed the conventional wisdom in the spring of 1998. The Reverend Jesse Jackson, a member of the traveling delegation as Clinton’s special envoy to Africa, said that the judge’s decision, coming while the president was completing a historic trip, was “a convergence that could only be planned by God.”

But some of Clinton’s aides had seen enough to know that the conventional wisdom was not accounting for the zeal of Starr and Republicans against the president. As they saw it, the president had lied under oath. That the case that inspired his testimony was later judged to be without merit was beside the point. One Clinton adviser tried to remind the president of this point as the Africa trip ended just as it had begun, with a long ride over the Atlantic: “Sir, the ruling is great news,” the aide began delicately, “but you know this business may not be over.”

Clinton looked surprised for a moment, then irritated, as if he had been interrupted with business in the middle of a party. He stared for a moment. “I know that,” he said finally. “It’s never over.”