Monday, December 27, 1993
Friday, January 28, 1994
Saturday, January 29, 1994
Our eighth session stretched over a pivotal month. On December 27, with the South Lawn closed off for the presidential helicopter, I was diverted to street parking and the entrance through West Wing security. Trouble started there with two wrapped Christmas presents in my briefcase, intended for the president and first lady. Conferences ensued. While officers with earpieces took them away for X-ray or worse, others obliged me to wait on the unstated premise that I was suspect until the gifts proved innocent. My telephone inquiries brought mixed consolation that President Clinton was himself overdue from a duck-hunting excursion to the Eastern Shore of Maryland. His delays outlasted mine, until a soldier came by my station in full camouflage with a matching shotgun case. He stopped long enough to indicate in clipped stories that it was no small undertaking to move a president with armed guests into a duck blind by dawn, then safely home, hinting that POTUS was unhappy with other units on this mission for mishaps in traffic and transportation. I could not decide whether Clinton really liked to shoot at ducks, which was a disappointing thought, or had steeled himself in political dedication to woo hunters for his gun control measures. Bulletins kept me in a holding pattern while he juggled a backlog of appointments. Our session was shifted, squeezed, and finally aborted.
“Can you ever forgive me?” asked the president. “I’m sorry. I’ve wasted your day.” He darted about his small study next to the Oval Office, sorting through boxes and shelves for items to stuff into a large duffel on the desk, which he called his “Santa Claus bag,” for people in Arkansas. He was scrambling to depart again—this time with a holiday entourage that included his ailing mother—with small logistical armies already mobilized on a coordinated timetable for Air Force One. Clinton fussed that he had mislaid some things and couldn’t find others. When he called out for help, personal aides came in to shrug before rushing on with last-minute travel bags bound for the helicopter. I told him not to fret about the lost session, but suggested that we set no more of them for the daytime. He agreed that we did much better at night in the privacy of the residence, and he wanted to keep current. “I’m anxious to talk to you about this shit with the troopers,” he said eagerly.
This comment took me aback. I knew from titillating stories in the mainstream press that a small conservative magazine called The American Spectator had just published trooper-based allegations of wild philandering with unnamed women. The story was testing the limits of national appetite for soap opera in politics, and I had assumed Clinton would recoil from its tawdry embarrassment above all other subjects. On the contrary, he raised it himself more than once. “There is some really good stuff here,” he said, “and we’ve got to get it down.” We talked of rescheduling another session soon, especially since his allergies had abbreviated the last one. While he packed the duffel, I showed him our son’s citation in the ten-year-old division of the Maryland chess tournament, and the president seemed excited that Franklin had found a sports outlet compatible with his hip disease. “This is the greatest thing,” he said. “I’ve got to write him a note.” He picked busily through little stacks of presents, asking out loud for his pens gone astray. My pride as a father overcame any reluctance to impose, but when I offered him my own pen, the president stared blankly. He said he meant a different kind, and finally located several boxes of presidential logo pins to supplement the stash of knickknack presents. Deflated, I realized his mind had raced so quickly past thoughts of a note for Franklin that he didn’t notice our mixing up of pen and pin.
His secretary, Betty Currie, hurried in with an armload of identical, finely wrapped gifts and a hug. (I had known her when she worked at the Peace Corps under Carter.) The president signed one of the gifts for me—a fresh collection of favorite speeches from his first year in office—and I handed him in return my two wrapped survivors from the Secret Service security. A minute or two later, eyeing them warily under a pile of things to be left behind, I told him he could open mine now. He paused to smile. “Oh, I can?” he asked, teasing me. His face lit up when he examined the old parchment inside. “Where did you find this?” he exclaimed. It was an original 1826 edition of Daniel Webster’s memorial tribute to John Adams and Thomas Jefferson after their famously coincidental deaths on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the vote by the 1776 Continental Congress to approve their drafting committee’s Declaration of Independence. Clinton mentioned the subsequent election of 1800 among many fateful dramas in the tempestuous relationship between these two Founders. I told him Webster ranged over such themes in this classic oration at Boston’s Faneuil Hall on August 2, 1826, which date in turn marked exactly fifty years since Jefferson, Adams, John Hancock, and most other delegates had reconvened to sign the finished Declaration.
Beaming, Clinton reached for my other gift, zipped up the duffel, and swept out past valets coming to fetch his gear. We stopped in the Oval Office long enough to wish each other happy holidays above the noise of the Marine One helicopter engines on the landing pad outside. I told him Hillary’s present was a dictation machine like the two we were using, and encouraged him to support my plea for her to record her own oral history with it, even if she never told a soul. He nodded. “I’m sorry again for standing you up,” said the president.
CLINTON BEGAN WITH solemn directness when we resumed at the residence in the early evening of Friday, January 28, in the new year of 1994. He said we had a lot to do. The month since our last session had been an important, traumatic period in his life—with the death of his mother, a long trip to Europe, the establishment of a Whitewater special prosecutor, and his State of the Union Address, among many lesser events. He wanted to take two or three hours to get the highlights straight, but our time tonight was short. His first lively responses addressed key personnel transitions, beginning with the new deputy chief of staff. Harold Ickes, son of FDR’s interior secretary, was precisely the sort of crack-the-whip administrator needed to make government function well, Clinton observed, but the appointment had been held up for months because of a complicated investigation at Ickes’s New York law firm. Then, with the obstacles finally removed, Ickes unaccountably had lost his brash, self-assured manner, telling both the president and Hillary that he was afraid to take the job. They were baffled. Ickes reconsidered, refused again, and sank into a kind of limbo. The president said it took quite an effort to coax him into the White House with restored confidence for the major legislative tasks ahead: health care, the crime bill, welfare reform. “He’s doing great now,” Clinton added, “but this illustrates for me how hard it can be to read the character of people here in Washington—even people you’ve known for a long time.”
He commented glumly on his second failed nomination to head the Civil Rights Division at the Justice Department. Sponsors in the civil rights community, especially the Congressional Black Caucus, had remained deadlocked long after it emerged that John Payton had not voted for ten years—very likely, said Clinton, because the sponsors did not want to acknowledge their own glaring oversight. Worse, he added, they turned against their nominee for the wrong reason, only when key legislators decided that Payton might not be vigilant enough about buttressing their incumbency advantages in specially carved districts. Clinton said such objections rested on a selfish distortion of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Its central purpose was to guarantee representation broadly for voters, he explained, not for officeholders. The president disputed a conventional wisdom equating fairness with “safe” seats in heavily minority districts. He said constituents from such districts could be taken for granted, and he criticized minority Democrats for colluding with Republicans in several states to create sinecures on both sides of the aisle. The voters would be better served by some impartial way to maximize rather than minimize competitive districts, Clinton observed, but he would not dispute the raw politics on Payton’s flawed credentials. In fact, he said he remained so heartsick from the Lani Guinier controversy that he was leaving this problematic selection to Janet Reno through regular channels.
Conflict also dogged some bigger transitions at the Pentagon. Clinton recalled quiet discussions with Tony Lake and others about replacing Defense Secretary Les Aspin even before the Black Hawk helicopter losses in Somalia. He said Aspin had never made a good impression at the National Security Council, where his meandering presentations had an aimless quality that obscured any managerial talent or drive. Some people even doubted Aspin’s attachment to his post, but the president discovered otherwise when he asked privately for a resignation on December 15. Aspin reacted with what Clinton called a “character transplant,” arguing forcefully and cogently why he should be retained. He had given up a House chairmanship to help Clinton adjust the military posture after the Cold War, Aspin reminded him, tackling a challenge that might well determine the next election. The president said he conceded some of the strengths Aspin claimed for himself, then told him directly that his reactions in moments of crisis had instilled confusion and doubt instead of purpose, which Clinton believed would happen again if permitted. He said it took more than one insistent, painful conversation to achieve a clean severance.
The president’s announced choice to replace Aspin lasted one bizarre month. He said retired admiral Bobby Ray Inman had drawn unanimous enthusiasm from the foreign policy establishment, including members of Congress from both parties. A Texas Republican, Inman had headed the super-secret National Security Agency under Reagan, served as deputy director of the CIA, and enjoyed a reputation for lean, skillful administration. Clinton said Inman’s fervent supporters ran the gamut from contracting specialists and four-star military officers to general advisers like David Gergen and Strobe Talbott, the new deputy secretary of state. He digressed briefly to note that the recent promotion of Talbott—his old schoolmate in England, my longtime acquaintance in journalism—came solely on the initiative of Secretary Christopher, against Clinton’s reservations about elevating Talbott above his proven specialty as the administration’s troubleshooter for all things Russian. Clinton switched back to the Pentagon appointment before I could tell whether he was worried about charges of cronyism, or genuinely feared some lapse without Talbott focused on the vast and vital transformation of Russia. Clinton said that only Mack McLarty had expressed misgiving about the preliminary interviews with Inman, finding him oddly detached in manner—“kind of dreamy,” as Clinton put it—but a strong consensus of national security experts overwhelmed his vague instincts.
The Inman nomination went forward to general acclaim, although Clinton did find it nettlesome when, at their joint announcement, the admiral pronounced himself satisfied that the president could be entrusted with the nation’s safety, as though Inman occupied some superior position to make the judgment. Then, ten days ago on January 18, Inman abruptly renounced his appointment with a tirade against “modern McCarthyism,” naming Senator Dole and New York Times columnist William Safire among conspirators plotting to ruin him. Inman’s outburst stunned observers. Not a single senator was opposed to his confirmation, and the few press quibbles were lost in a sea of public praise, but dramatic shifts had occurred out of sight. The president said Inman changed from the moment Dole agreed to allow questions from Republican senators, becoming so agitated that the administration’s background investigators returned to Inman several times about rumors that he was gay. The admiral denied them convincingly, said Clinton, but did acknowledge a closeted relative, whose status was unknown to his mother, and Inman came unhinged with fear that disclosures from the confirmation process would destroy his family. Many secrets, both real ones and decoys, simply vanished with him beneath a volley of stories bidding good riddance to his mysterious, prickly paranoia.
President Clinton expressed no great remorse over Inman’s departure. He seemed much relieved to have appointed a successor already, and was full of compliments for William Perry. The incoming defense secretary was not only safe—reliable and experienced as the current Pentagon deputy—but also an innovator with whom the president enjoyed talking military strategy. While Clinton was glad that Inman ducked a prolonged scandal for himself and the administration, he could not help musing that political changes rushed by on fever and whim. No discipline or balance guided attention to significant issues buried in the Inman saga, such as how for decades so brittle a figure had mastered the most sensitive spy agencies. Almost inevitably, the president related this abbreviated affair to his own troubles in Whitewater. He said that although the press never ignited the allegations against Inman in public, reporters had created a subterranean political force by circulating the rumors of homosexuality. This was not nearly as pervasive or sinister as McCarthyism, he said, but hidden agendas advanced unchecked on sensationalism. To that degree, he sympathized with Inman.
There was extra bite in tonight’s roving lament on Whitewater, which consumed nearly an hour. Under duress, the president had just consented to a special prosecutor—Robert Fiske—named by Attorney General Reno eight days ago on January 20. Even Clinton, with his runaway gripes, could not anticipate a seven-year investigation that would outlast his presidency, but he was plenty upset. Now Fiske must hire a new staff and start all over again on the land deal questions from 1978, plus new ones that undoubtedly would be raised, and Clinton fumed that he and Hillary would wind up spending most of their net worth defending against charges yet to be specified because there was nothing there. He gave numerous theories on causes and combinations behind the latest outcry for a special prosecutor. Scoffing at the standard rationale—that some clarifying authority was urgently needed, and harmless, because Whitewater was incomprehensible—he speculated that the outcry borrowed drumbeat energy from sex rumors beneath the surface. There was no logical connection between them, but that was his point. What they had in common was a feverish, hidden agenda, reminiscent of Inman’s demise, abetted by what the president called a prevailing condescension toward Arkansas people as hillbillies still rooted in backwardness, promiscuous and corrupt, epitomized by Clinton.
A Whitewater chorus had intensified above the furtive pulse of revelations from the Arkansas state troopers, and here Clinton delved into the discoveries he had mentioned the last time we spoke. He said the first warnings had come in a report from his Arkansas political director that Danny Ferguson, a trooper in the former security detail at the governor’s mansion, had left a message with the White House pleading to discuss an unspecified emergency. Clinton returned the call, expecting some personal or family petition, and heard instead Ferguson’s anguished confession-turned-warning that he had been among four troopers meeting clandestinely with Cliff Jackson and various reporters. Ferguson told him Jackson was connected to a political network that was well organized and well financed—dangling dream jobs, book contracts, and even movie deals for the troopers, offering as much as $300,000 to women if they would say publicly they had slept with Clinton. The president said he had since confirmed some of this, and that Ferguson—battered by temptation, peer pressure, guilt, and fear—refused to be a named source for the American Spectator story, only to have two of the remaining troopers expose him anyway as their cold-footed confederate.
Ferguson told him, Clinton continued, that the troopers had been encouraged to volunteer speculation and uncorroborated gossip so long as they could agree on the specifics. The overriding goal was to get the sex tales into the news media, which required them to be provocative and consistent but not necessarily accurate. This point sent Clinton on another tangent about the press. “The reporters would just stampede and print anything,” he seethed. One juicy story had spread from the Spectator into many mainstream outlets, alleging that the president-elect had slipped off with a judge’s wife at his farewell party in Little Rock, so brazenly that Hillary had called the woman a whore. He said every bit of that was ridiculous. The farewell party had jammed several hundred couples into a one-room airplane hangar. Chelsea was there. The judge and his wife continued by charter flight to Washington for the inauguration. The wife, like the other women indirectly described by the Spectator, but carefully not named, flatly denied an affair with Clinton. She went so far as to warn CNN that the charge was a slander garnished with absurd details, but Tom Johnson, president of CNN News, gave her a laconic response, something like, “Well, I guess that means you won’t let us use your name.” The president qualified this attributed quote, saying he heard it only secondhand, but he believed the substance by CNN’s rush to broadcast the story.
Clinton’s rants against the press conveyed more than a touch of disappointment. He was accustomed to war from political enemies, but it seemed that he had looked up to big-time newspapers as truth seekers of greater refinement. The Washington Post and New York Times had been “a little better” on the sex stories, he observed. They did not brandish them on the front page with lurid headlines like the tabloids, and they noted reservations about the troopers’ veracity. He complained, on the other hand, that these premier newspapers had led the charge for a Whitewater special prosecutor with compensating gusto and indignation, as though nurturing a more respectable crusade to keep pace. On Whitewater, Clinton looked forward to fairer treatment from Fiske.
The president stood, late for engagements. There were so many more subjects, he said, pacing while I rewound the tapes, and he wanted to talk especially about his mother. He said he called her every Sunday night, but the funeral went by in such a blur of crises over NATO and Russia and scandals that it did not hit him until he returned from Europe late on a Sunday, with no one to call—how much he missed her. Could I come back in a few hours, and perhaps stay over? This was feasible because of my speaking engagement there in Washington that same night, around which we had scheduled our session, and arrangements were quickly made. I drove to a nearby synagogue for yortzheit services honoring Rabbi Abraham Heschel on the approximate anniversary of his death. On my return, an usher said President Clinton was too tired to work and in fact had gone to bed while his guests watched the film Grumpy Old Men. He showed me to the Queens’ Bedroom, which I had not seen since our whirlwind inspection on inauguration day.
EARLY THE NEXT morning, I made my way to the far end of the long yellow corridor to search for coffee. In the small upstairs kitchen, across from the master bedroom, I came upon two butlers standing near Clinton, who sat hunched over the breakfast table clad in boxer shorts and a hooded sweatshirt. He greeted me with a barely decipherable rasp, saying his voice was gone and he had stayed up through the night because his cold medicine failed to work and Hillary had come home from a health care trip at five o’clock. He said he hoped to record something, but he felt pretty bad. I had no doubt of that. Wordless, the butlers gave me stricken looks tinged with reproach, signaling that I had intruded upon their custody of the president’s intimate, vulnerable state. I retreated hastily from the image of his bare feet on the cold floor beneath strikingly pale, hairless legs—old man’s legs—far too spindly it seemed for the torso above, which was larger than mine, or for his leonine, sniffling head. I told Clinton I would await his instructions back in the Queens’ Bedroom, and much to my surprise a transformed president appeared there an hour later, dressed to befit the high office. He beckoned me to set up the recorders quickly in a hallway landing nearby, where we could hide until the staff rounded him up for his Saturday morning radio address.
The president reviewed his mother’s illness. Virginia Kelley had a mastectomy upon being diagnosed with breast cancer in 1990, and new symptoms had revealed a malignancy spreading into her bones. He said she was very sick when she came to Washington for the inauguration a year ago. The cancer was attacking her bone marrow’s capacity to replace red blood cells, which would have killed her swiftly if the doctors had not given her transfusions. Each of these provided a tonic jolt from the donated red blood cells, and Clinton said he knew on one level that the treatment masked her underlying condition. She was frail, and her hair fell out from the chemotherapy. Yet she was proud of her nice-looking wig, and seemed to be having such a good time—flying all around the country—that he decided she might last a few more years. Besides, she was his mother, and he believed the best until an improbable encounter at November’s APEC meetings in Seattle. An Arkansas doctor he knew, who attended on one of many state delegations seeking commercial concessions with Asian nations, had emphatically waved off Clinton’s rosy report on her health. He had just seen Virginia Kelley’s charts. She had essentially no bone marrow function, and, barring a miracle by lottery from experimental drugs, was unlikely to survive more than three months. The doctor thought it was important for the family to know.
“This really brought me up short,” said the president. He tried to discuss these grim prospects with his mother, but she deflected him. At Camp David for Thanksgiving, she shrugged off his updated reports that she was getting as many as two transfusions per day. When they flew home together after Christmas, she joined a raucous pizza dinner as usual but then shooed him off to go bowling with his old high school friends. They finally had a mother-son visit for three hours the next morning, alone at her home in Hot Springs. “We talked about everything except the fact that she was dying,” Clinton recalled, with regret. She wanted to live her remaining time normally, and he took consolation from her goodbye trip to Las Vegas for Barbra Streisand’s New Year’s concerts. The president said that while it was easy for the press to sneer at the Streisand friendship as a Hollywood publicity stunt, she and his mother sustained an odd-couple bond. They talked constantly for a year. He said the same was true of the only other famous person at his mother’s funeral, Buffalo Bills owner Ralph Wilson. By the second quarter of Wilson’s disastrous Super Bowl XXVII—a blowout loss to the Dallas Cowboys—the owner was surprised to learn that his Arkansas guest, Clinton’s mother, was not only a diehard Bills fan but also “fairly tight” already from trips to the bar, sharing a compatible outlook on life’s hardships.
Notice of her death reached Clinton after midnight on January 6. He spent time at home comforting his brother, who had leaned heavily on their mother through his own severe troubles with drug use and imprisonment. “Roger hated our father a lot more than I did,” said Clinton, explaining that the violent, alcoholic tantrums of the senior Clinton had fallen hard on his younger sibling. The president said he had made a strenuous plea for self-control just before the funeral. “This day is for Mother,” he told Roger, “but if we argue or yell or break down, then the whole thing is going to be about us.” Separately, he praised his stepfather Richard Kelley—Virginia’s fourth husband—for leadership through an emotional impasse about whether her grave should lie among the Clintons in Hot Springs, or elsewhere. Kelley took Clinton aside to defer, saying she should be buried in Hope next to the president’s biological father and namesake, William Jefferson Blythe, who had died in a car crash before Clinton was born. “He was the first and great love of her life,” Kelley told him magnanimously. “It’s proper for you to decide, and we’ll worry later about where I’ll be buried.” That settled, the family pulled together for the funeral, and Clinton described its joyful service of tribute. A preacher said Virginia Kelley once caught him at the racetrack when he was supposed to be at a ministerial convention. Janice Sjostrand sang the Pentecostal hymn “Holy Ground,” in a reprise of her performance at the inaugural prayer service at Metropolitan AME, moving Streisand to express awe that such music could come from human beings. A post-burial reception filled the Western Sizzlin steak house.
From Arkansas, Air Force One stopped over in Washington just long enough to exchange passengers while Clinton gathered up some items for his diplomatic tour of Europe. The presidential party took off again within hours, amid a crescendo of demands to formalize the Whitewater investigation. On our tape, the president complained that Republican leaders—Iowa’s Jim Leach and Georgia’s Newt Gingrich in the House, Bob Dole in the Senate—“kept up their flacking” on talk shows right through the funeral, pushing for a special prosecutor. “The guy couldn’t even let me bury my mother,” he said bitterly of Dole. He said Al Gore, probably to calm him down, postulated wryly from their service together in the Senate that Dole had “a nice streak.” Gore detected generous sparks within Dole’s flinty disposition, which amused Clinton. “Maybe nobody gave Dole any presents this year,” Clinton quipped. “He’s been really nasty since Christmas. I wish I had sent him a present myself.”
The president sketched his tightrope mission abroad. He lobbied NATO officials in Belgium on a delicate timetable for adding new members from the former Soviet empire—rapidly enough to ease their fears of being isolated or reabsorbed, slowly enough not to topple Yeltsin beneath Russia’s ultranationalist revival stoked by Vladimir Zhirinovsky. In Moscow, he assuaged Yeltsin while pushing him to recall troops from the three tiny Baltic nations occupied by Russia for nearly fifty years. In Kiev, he closed a deal for Ukraine to surrender stockpiles of Soviet nuclear weapons. In Minsk, he addressed leaders of newly independent Belarus. In Geneva, his personal introduction to Syria’s President Asad lasted through five hours of intense talks on the Middle East.
All the while, Clinton carried with him political and personal grief from home. He said his mother’s death left him keenly attuned to nostalgia. On a Sunday’s walking tour of Brussels, he stopped outside a toy shop he recognized from a visit more than two decades earlier. It was closed, but commotion drew the owners downstairs from their apartment to open for him. The president said he still remembered the decor inside, and bought something to honor the owners’ courtesy. He appreciated a timely gift of two saxophones from Dinant, Belgium, where the instrument had been invented. Their soothing tone was nearly as rich as the world-class Yamahas, he observed, adding that most saxophones were made lately either in Paris or a small town in Indiana, where, for obscure reasons he knew, the sax makers affiliated with the United Auto Workers union. Clinton said he made extra time to play the sax in the Czech Republic, visiting coffeehouses with Czech president Václav Havel. His official business there was to persuade the presidents of Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia to accept a carefully protracted entry into NATO, but he dwelled instead on a walk from Prague Castle over the storied Charles Bridge with U.N. ambassador Madeleine Albright. She spoke fluent Czech more than fifty years after fleeing the Nazis as a little girl, and was plainly overcome by this return to her birthplace liberated from Soviet rule—accompanied in grand style by the president of her adopted country along with Havel, the poetic dissident turned architect of new democracy. Albright exchanged tales about a similar odyssey for General Shalikashvili, a childhood refugee from Poland. On a lesser arc, Clinton said he recalled a youthful pilgrimage to this romantic city in 1970, when Prague was Communist and his mother was alive.
American politics overtook the president in Prague. Incessant clamor about Whitewater forced an international conference call with his closest advisers on January 11, which Clinton described as a heated continuation of the stalemate over how to respond to the trooper stories. Half the inner circle argued that he should ignore the fray, and refuse to get “down in the gutter” with his detractors, while the other half said he could win only by fighting every accusation. Clinton said it was impossible to do both. In this fierce debate, he added, Hillary remained the staunchest opponent of agreeing to a special prosecutor for Whitewater—steadier than his lawyers. From her legal work on the House impeachment staff in the Nixon era, she insisted that presidents must be investigated, and impeached if warranted, for misuse of their unique powers in office. The vague Whitewater allegations were miles beneath this standard, rooted in actions long before Clinton’s term, and she said a special prosecutor on these facts was not only foolish but wrong. It would invite open-ended persecution while tampering with constitutional balance. On the other side, Clinton’s political advisers foresaw unstoppable decline so long as opponents and critics could keep up cries that he must be hiding something. Democratic allies were joining Republican demands that he put suspicions to rest, while Whitewater dominated press conferences even in Europe. The president said he merely went through the motions on the showdown phone conference. Sleepwalking half the time, he chose to invite an independent investigation even though he agreed with Hillary. The Whitewater special prosecutor “is setting a terrible precedent,” he believed, but it was the only way to calm the uproar. He had given in for relief.
The president asked whether I had seen a column by E. J. Dionne at the end of December, speculating about why Republicans hate him so much. He endorsed its thesis that Republicans focus on Clinton’s character because they feel threatened by his agenda. Clinton is trying to restore confidence that politics and government matter broadly to citizens, and Republicans feel handicapped in such competition—largely because they really want to shrink the public agenda toward the basics of war and ceremony. Therefore, Dionne argued, any success by Clinton incites them to harsher attacks on stronger ground, which for them is personal. Clinton nodded. This was why he should expect some recycled scandal whenever his approval ratings get too high, but here he recognized a drawback to his Whitewater decision. The special investigation rewarded character politics. It would reinforce the divide between substance and diversion.
There was stirring at the far end of the yellow hallway. Aides hovered with his script—doubtless still in revision—anxious to get him over to the Oval Office for the live radio broadcast. (It opened with a confession that he was still hoarse from Tuesday’s State of the Union Address.) The president said we should wrap up, reserving some topics for later. They included the State of the Union—with its publicized gesture of his pen raised aloft, challenging Congress not to make him veto a health care bill providing less than universal coverage—and especially his grueling talk with Syria’s President Asad, but Clinton wanted to mention something not on my list. He said he had picked up a bad feeling on the trip to Russia. He called it just an ominous sixth sense. “I had it, and Hillary had it, too,” he said. They worried about long-term prospects for Russia and parts of Central Europe. “Democracy may make it there,” he mused, “but you can begin to feel why patterns of history repeat themselves.” He said we must bear in mind that these nations have been invaded many times, unlike the United States, and it was hard for Russia to get through the shock of establishing markets and openly functioning government, away from evaluating herself by military threats and dominion over surrounding countries. “I think this is what the twenty-first century is going to be about,” the president concluded. “How freedom will survive all these pressures where it’s never really been tested.”
These historical forebodings reminded me of President Clinton’s somber mood about China in an earlier session. He said his reactions were similar but distinct. As opposed to inward dangers to Russia, and within Russia, he was more preoccupied with outward projections of Chinese power. When I asked if he could elaborate on anything Jiang Zemin might have said along these lines, the president vividly recalled their private meeting. He said Jiang was well aware that mammoth size and rapid growth destined his economy to become the largest on earth. Jiang’s rhetoric in Seattle had invoked this future so lucidly that Clinton conceded to him the possibility of a very different summit in fifty years, when some leader might try to cajole a U.S. president to “reform” our Constitution and laws along Chinese lines. Jiang declared that Chinese rulers believed in discipline for their people, not from them, and he bluntly diminished American self-government as a small and dubious blip on the Chinese calendar, not a monument of world history. In my notes, dictated moments later on the way home, I said I could only approximate the eloquent force of President Clinton’s relayed quotation. “Look,” Jiang told him. “It’s wonderful that you have all this freedom, and all this money, but what do you do with it? You have 33,000 homicides by guns. Your cities are uninhabitable. Your schools don’t work. You have rampant drug use, and you can’t control your population. Who is to say that your freedom is worth it?”