Wednesday, April 20, 1994
Tuesday, April 26, 1994
Assorted crises buffeted both sessions in April. President Clinton came into the parlor at 9:20 still in his business suit, chewing an unlit cigar to keep awake. He said he had been up three nights running. Serb militias were about to overrun Gorazde in Bosnia. His crime bill was squeezing through one house, education through another, and American pilots had mistakenly shot down two Black Hawk helicopters over Iraq, killing twenty-six allied soldiers. The president had tried to cancel me at the last minute, when I was already en route and impossible to reach. Now he urged me to skim for highlights until he gave out or needed to quit.
I asked about his second nomination to the Supreme Court, which would turn out to be his last. Clinton, far from embracing the historic choice ahead, strikingly regretted the resignation of Justice Harry Blackmun, who had been his only friend on the Court. He described Blackmun as an old-fashioned progressive Republican, strong-willed and congenial, and recalled the bond of conversations at seminars and social events going back some time. The justice had come in the previous year to talk about quitting, but now his mind was made up, and Clinton outlined his ensuing negotiations with the Senate majority leader, George Mitchell of Maine. The president said his approach had been straightforward but perhaps unfairly vague. He told Mitchell “flat out” that he was his first choice—that Mitchell was perfect as a respected former judge who also would meet Clinton’s goal of seasoning the Court with justices of political experience—unless Mitchell’s subtraction from the Senate figured to doom the national health care bill. They first weighed this condition together, sifting likely ramifications, and then Mitchell withdrew to ponder alone. A fiendishly difficult task required him to project interdependent outcomes objectively, from assumptions with and without his own Senate leadership, but Clinton said he returned in person with a comprehensive analysis. While Mitchell could not say that his loss from the Senate would be decisive for the health care bill, he did predict that the pending shift to the Court would injure the president’s chances for reelection in 1996. Mitchell concluded, therefore, not to accept the seat even though he aspired to be on the Court. Mitchell’s selfless decision was forceful, statesmanlike, and persuasive, said Clinton—yet all the more wrenching because it embodied everything he hoped for in a Supreme Court justice.
When I asked about his latest efforts to promote the health care bill, the president took more respite than I expected or wished. From bare mention of a forum in Deerfield Beach, Florida, he remembered that day’s round of golf with PGA tour professional Raymond Floyd, which triggered an animated description of the course complete with a stroke-by-stroke replay of one hole. It was a short par-4 of 225 or 230 yards over a pond to a fairway that doglegged sharply around trees. He said most players used an iron from the tee to cross the water safely, then a second shot to the green, but he had emulated Floyd’s daring long shot over both the water and trees to reach the green in one. While he replayed the club selection and trajectory, for his shot as well as Floyd’s, I debated my own role as usual. Should I nudge him back to a more presidential subject, especially given the time pressure? Or would future historians find it revealing that the president’s mind refracted to golf from an impasse between health care and a Supreme Court choice? Did it reflect his earlier pessimism about the bill, or simply his enthusiasm for golf? Should I ask if he regretted not appointing Senator Mitchell without condition, which would imply that Clinton ought to accept early defeat on his major initiative for the year? In the end, as he was re-creating his long putt for eagle, I interrupted merely to suggest that we return to choices for the Court. (The golf story would remain unfinished until a future session, when the president said he had three-putted for par and Floyd made birdie. Clinton was satisfied with four, given the tricky contours, and stated convincingly more than once that his three putts did not diminish the thrill of driving the green.)
Since Mitchell, Clinton had been evaluating U.S. District Court Judge José Cabranes of Connecticut. He thought the first Hispanic justice would be a step forward, but doubtful asides punctuated his glowing review of Cabranes’s career and legal opinions. The president said Cabranes was an assimilated patrician who did not even consider himself Hispanic. He noted rumors of political horse trading by Cabranes, emphasizing that they were rumors. Impulsively, I observed that Clinton’s tone seemed to undercut his words of praise, like a brief without enthusiasm. Was he trying to talk himself into Cabranes? I reproached myself as soon as this impertinent comment silenced the president. Having affirmed only moments ago that my main function was to stimulate a candid flow of his recollections, I now found myself distorting the record.
From an awkward pause, I stressed the value of preserving his thoughts on the Supreme Court selection, and the president homed in for half an hour. He described the vetting procedures, the regular councils with his delegated staff, and mostly his own examination of various candidates. Still seeking a political justice, he said he had explored Speaker Tom Foley and former Democratic governor Gerald Baliles of Virginia. From the Senate, he discussed Pat Leahy of Vermont and Paul Sarbanes of Maryland, both Democrats as well. He had thought about Solicitor General Drew Days, saying he admired his mind and would not recoil from two African-American justices at once, but Clinton decided that recent arguments by Days before the Court would raise complicated problems for Senate confirmation. Of sitting judges, the president sketched a black female from New York, but his personal favorite clearly was U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Richard Arnold from the Eighth Circuit. Arnold was “far and away the best lawyer and best judge in the country”—but with two drawbacks. First, he suffered a dormant but dangerous form of lymphoma, which clouded his future. Second, Arnold was from Arkansas. The Washington Post had endorsed Arnold as the preeminent candidate, dismissing potential charges of cronyism, but the president was not sure the advance exoneration would hold up. He said he was still wrestling with the intertwined questions.
We recalled last year’s near-choice of Bruce Babbitt to fill Byron White’s seat on the Court. As with George Mitchell and others, Clinton’s goal of a political justice ran into the political cost of the appointment. He said Babbitt was still too valuable at the Interior Department, even though his presumed wizardry had failed to prevent revolts over grazing fees and timber policy. Clinton thought it was almost impossible for an environmentalist Democrat to appoint any interior secretary without losing the West. “I’ve decided that grazing fees are like Bosnia,” he said with a sigh. “Nobody can handle it.”
We switched to the ongoing death struggle around the Muslim city of Gorazde in eastern Bosnia. Today, more than a week into emergency consultations, Clinton had held a press conference to shore up support in Western countries for more NATO intervention. Ironically, said the president, the recent partial treaty had intensified the fighting in many parts, because the Muslim and Croat armies—once they stopped fighting each other—turned aggressively to recapture territories lost to the Serbs since 1991. And the Serbs, who controlled more than 70 percent of Bosnia already, tightened their strangleholds in response. Earlier this month, U.S. jets struck the siege guns around Gorazde with NATO authorization. It was a halfhearted attack, said Clinton. Air strikes spectacularly obliterated a Serb tank, but three bombs didn’t even go off. It was mostly to show that NATO finally could act, and the Serbs retaliated as feared by seizing U.N. peacekeepers on the ground. Now, despite these hostages, NATO gave the Serbs an ultimatum threatening further air strikes unless the siege guns pulled back within forty-eight hours. Clinton said they were trying to save Gorazde with bluff and baling wire.
On other worries, the president reviewed fierce lobbying on both sides of his recent decision not to grant clemency for the imprisoned Jonathan Pollard.* He was philosophical about three hikes in national interest rates since our last meeting—an unprecedented cluster—saying the Federal Reserve had been certain to clamp down on the economy after figures showed a 7 percent growth rate for the fourth-quarter GDP. Of the ongoing rampage against Rwandan Tutsis in central Africa, Clinton commended the U.S. ambassador there for a remarkable job evacuating American citizens. This was not a very positive mission, he added, but it was all that could be done in the midst of the chaotic tribal warfare. The president thought more Rwandans had been killed since the April 6 uprising than in either of the protracted wars in Somalia and Angola. CNN seldom showed pictures of the bodies on television, he said, so fewer people cared.
* Pollard, a civilian analyst for the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, pleaded guilty in 1987 to one charge of espionage, for selling U.S. military secrets to Israel, and received a life sentence.
His digressions on the press were shorter and more cerebral. He expected the Whitewater coverage, which had receded for weeks, to surge again before summer. He said Floyd Brown, who had produced the notorious Willie Horton attack ads for the Bush campaign in 1988, had attached a Washington staff of twenty-six to the formidable array of publicists, think tanks, and lawyers pushing the generic scandal. Summarizing a book on the trivialization of press culture,* Clinton grandly improvised contrasting news bulletins—a “classic” one of facts impacting the world, then a “spin” version of the same event: “In a desperate attempt to rescue his faltering campaign, Senator Kennedy accused Vice President Nixon . . .” He dissected the book’s thesis that modern news tilted to pamper consumers rather than inform citizens, with entertainment and subjective gamesmanship. On this point, Clinton cited a line from radio host Garrison Keillor’s recent speech to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, decrying that our fellow baby boomers were “the sort of people who will stand in an aisle at the grocery store and argue the merits of two different brands of olive oil.”
* Thomas E. Patterson, Out of Order (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993).
Sheepishly, the president admitted that he was wrong to answer yesterday’s televised question about whether he wore boxers or briefs. He should have ducked. He should have said he was too old to discuss underwear, but then, he didn’t think of himself as old. To him, anyone even a year younger than he was young, and old people were from his parents’ generation. He grimaced and grinned. Now he had set off a little press frenzy himself, foreclosing any chance for a sober dialogue about the MTV youth audience. He said they really were different. They seemed surrounded by uncertainty and decay. Their devil-may-care attitude had a streak of nihilism that was not part of Clinton’s own youth.
He delved into the friendly fire disaster in the skies over Iraq. Not nearly all the facts were known yet, as the two U.S. F-15s had shot down the two U.S. Black Hawk helicopters less than a week ago, on April 14. Clinton said he had to call President Mitterrand personally, because a few of the twenty-six victims were French soldiers. Most (fifteen) were Americans, but others included British soldiers with some Turkish soldiers and Kurdish civilians. The president had been meeting with Turkish prime minister Tansu Ciller when incoming cables confirmed the grim tragedy. He said he had promised the foreign leaders representatives on an international commission of inquiry. Now his purpose was to make sure that the commission, along with parallel U.S. investigations, uncovered every pertinent error in order to prevent a recurrence. He said many questions were murky. Why were the planes so anxious to shoot down helicopters that made no hostile moves? Were the helicopters fitted with extra tanks to resemble the Russian Hind-24s flown by Iraq? Why didn’t they answer requests for a friendly signal? Were the helicopters not painted with normal U.S. insignia? Did they make unscheduled desert stops in a mission to prevent attacks on Kurdish outposts by Saddam Hussein? He said there was much at stake beyond justice for the victims and their families, including trust for multinational military operations. Clinton believed the pilots would always have these deaths on their conscience. He was circumspect, but his questions themselves suggested that secrecy may have contributed to the deadly mistake.*
* Relatives would press demands for accountability through many investigations, but the Pentagon blocked testimony by key witnesses. One crew member, from an AWACS communications plane guiding the F-15s, was tried and acquitted on dereliction of duty charges by a 1995 court-martial. Private donors built a memorial at Giebelstadt Air Base, Germany, for the twenty-six victims, and moved it to Fort Rucker, Alabama, in 2006.
The president wearily asked me to stop the tapes. He had work to finish before bed, and he did not expect Richard Nixon to live through the night. As I packed up, he told me the former president had suffered an edema similar to the one that killed Hillary’s father. This kind of stroke was deceptive, he explained, because it could leave a good bit of brain capacity intact and raise hopes for recovery. However, pressure would build up slowly as blood pushed against the skull, shutting down bodily functions one by one. Clinton said the loss would sadden him, as he was getting along fairly well with our old antagonist from the Vietnam era. A month ago today, he had received from Nixon a letter about Russia that Clinton called the most brilliant communication on foreign policy to reach him as president. Nothing else came close, he said. It was about planning for a “post-Yeltsin era,” with penetrating studies of political characters and fledgling countries. Nixon anticipated that subnationalist movements aimed to break up the old Soviet Union still further, and Clinton wished he could talk more with Nixon about his recommendations. He said he had shared the letter only with Al Gore. So far, to guard against distortion and leaks, he was keeping it from his own foreign policy team—even Tony Lake.
An afterthought wafted from the bathroom. Sadly, Clinton called out, Nixon loved Pat so much that he seemed to decline quickly since she died last year. When I delivered tonight’s finished tapes, Clinton reflected that Nixon always had a hard time with his emotions. “He was one of those husbands,” said the president, “who couldn’t live with or without his wife.”
PRESIDENT CLINTON SEEMED distracted in our brief session six nights later. Following up on the friendly fire losses in Iraq, we finally reviewed his June 26 decision of the previous year to order a missile attack on the Baghdad headquarters of the Iraqi intelligence service. He recounted the background—how Kuwaiti authorities had arrested nearly a dozen Iraqis and six Kuwaitis about a year ago, just before a visit to the region by Clinton’s predecessor, George Bush. Two months later, classified reports found that bomb materials possessed by the detainees dovetailed with other evidence of an active plot to kill Bush on the orders of Saddam Hussein. When I mentioned the doubts raised subsequently by journalist Seymour Hersh, who argued in The New Yorker that the suspects were too unprofessional to be convincing assassins, and the official connections too weak, the president said he had shared that reaction at first. He found it ridiculous that Saddam Hussein would entrust the ultimate spy mission to a ragtag group of truck drivers and bar owners. Surely, he had thought, the Iraqi dictator must have a stable of more authentic killers, but his investigators informed him that Iraq’s terrorism was confined almost entirely to the military repression of its own people. Unlike Syria and Iran, Saddam did not maintain a network of highly trained civilians for terrorist operations abroad, and therefore he had no better alternative unless he was willing to send traceable and highly visible officers from his own army.
Three of the twenty-three U.S. Tomahawk cruise missiles had gone astray with their half-ton warheads, killing at least eight Iraqi civilians who lived near the target. “I regret the loss of life,” President Clinton said. His tone was wooden and mechanical. It sounded like an official statement for the record, with barely a trace of feeling, but he repeated the phrase several times. I could not be sure whether he was still hardening himself to the weight of presidential power. He seemed less familiar to me for a moment, with the gulf between us yawning wide. The reports had been unanimous, he emphasized. Even the CIA and FBI had risen above their habitual feuds to agree that the case in evidence amounted to an act of war against the United States, demanding a response. Clinton’s minor complaint was an exasperating aloofness by the Joint Chiefs, who, though pressed hard for a recommendation, steadfastly repeated the full range of options. While he could not state that General Powell, who was still chairman of the Joint Chiefs at the time, was hedging for protection in hindsight, the president said carefully, no straightforward opinion could be extracted, and Clinton alone chose to mount a singlestrike retaliation against the site of operational control. Doing less would invite further attacks, he decided, but more would be bellicose and wrong, especially since the plot had been foiled well short of success. He thought his course remained prudent. “At least it has stood the test of nine months’ time,” he concluded. “We don’t know how it will look later.”
Chelsea came in somewhat flustered, asking when her mother would be home. Clinton told her that Hillary would return from California tomorrow after a three-day trip for the health care bill. (This update, together with the playing cards and crossword puzzles strewn among his reading folders, made me speculate that a restless Clinton had summoned me for company.) In her absence, Chelsea spilled a confession that she had left her biology books at school overnight, which meant she had to get up before dawn to get there when the doors opened, as only then could she study for a make-up exam being offered because her class had scored the lowest average grade—67—in the history of Sidwell Friends biology. The president asked what her own grade had been, and she replied with a wince: 82. Quite sensibly, I thought, Clinton offered consolation that her situation was not so bad, being fifteen points above average, but Chelsea rolled her eyes. Her dismissive look said he was not the one who could appreciate the crisis. “I love you, Daddy,” she said. “Good night.” He and I exchanged semi-baffled nods in her wake.
On the tapes, the president presented no big developments in his search for a new Supreme Court appointment. He dispensed briskly with numerous subjects before a routine question opened a trail of sustained thought. The president first scribbled a note to himself that Strobe Talbott owed him a report on his recent trip to South Asia. He called this the one region on the globe facing a serious threat of nuclear war between two nations, India and Pakistan. Their mutual enmity was historically constant, yet chillingly erratic. In private, he disclosed, Indian officials spoke of knowing roughly how many nuclear bombs the Pakistanis possessed, from which they calculated that a doomsday nuclear volley would kill 300 to 500 million Indians while annihilating all 120 million Pakistanis. The Indians would thus claim “victory” on the strength of several hundred million countrymen they figured would be left over. But on the other side, the Pakistanis insisted that their rugged mountain terrain would shield more survivors than the exposed plains of India. “They really talk that way.” Clinton sighed.
“We have bad relations with both of them,” he continued. Locked in their arms race, India was furious that the United States had agreed to sell F-16 fighter planes to Pakistan, and Pakistan was no less enraged that the United States refused to deliver the planes years after receiving payment. Such transfers remained blocked since 1990 under the Pressler Amendment, which prohibited military sales to any country found to be developing nuclear weapons in violation of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Even worse for the Pakistanis, said Clinton, U.S. law obliged his administration to collect storage payments from Pakistan on its impounded F-16s gathering rust in American custody. The president hoped to devise a rebate or remedy for these grossly unfair charges, which he called a diplomatic insult, but he saw no cure for the larger strategic impasse over South Asia. He said the United States was trying to hold the line on a treaty that fed hostility and opportunism. If we didn’t try to enforce the ban on nuclear proliferation, plenty of countries would rush to sell the required technologies on our example. As long as we did try, however, we would draw upon ourselves some of the extraordinary venom between India and Pakistan. Clinton said this issue demanded persistence. His impression was that Talbott’s trip turned up little of promise, but he wanted the details.
When I asked whether Clinton paid much attention to the worldwide trade in nonnuclear, conventional arms, his answer seemed resigned. He had sent representatives to a worthy conference last year in Paris without much notice. Everybody peddles weapons, he allowed. We try to restrict them to our allies, but the flooded market leaks contraband through every barrier and restraint. And even if you could shut down new trade entirely, those who misuse weapons tend to have plenty already. Before discussing Bosnia as a potential exception, the president linked Pakistan to the general question of Muslim countries threatened by fundamentalist movements. He said the purpose of Turkish prime minister Tansu Ciller’s recent visit was to seek U.S. aid for her country in a way that would dampen rather than inflame the fundamentalist opposition to her government.
“I really like her,” Clinton kept saying. Characteristically, he alternated between personal connections and abstract analysis, burrowing into Turkish politics through stories about Ciller. He sketched her career as a pioneer female of Western education with Muslim roots in Istanbul, citing their shared memories of Yale, where Ciller once taught economics, and also the names of her key partners in Turkey’s modernist True Path Party. The president said she was adored or reviled by large rival factions at home, where her need for U.S. aid, like her gender and striking good looks, cut both ways in public opinion. It gave Clinton leverage to insist that Ciller’s government improve treatment of the Kurdish minority along Turkey’s border with Iraq, but it also made her more vulnerable to the fundamentalist Muslim parties. The president specified how many seats these parties had gained recently in the Turkish Parliament on their campaign pledge to suppress the dissident Kurds more thoroughly than Ciller. To protect Turkish democracy from theocrats, Clinton said he was obliged to balance U.S. interests with Ciller’s political needs, including her foreign policy. Because Turkey ardently sought membership in the European Union, which ran into fierce opposition led by Greece, Clinton himself worked to mediate their chronic clashes over the Mediterranean island of Cyprus. He listed dealings with more Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot leaders than I could remember for my notes. He confessed inadvertently telling Papandreou of Greece, before Ciller had properly communicated her goodwill gesture, that Turkey would disarm its patrol flights over the island.
The headaches were worthwhile, said the president, because Turkey was a strategic fulcrum. He called it the fifth or sixth most important country in the world. Along with Egypt, Indonesia, and to a lesser extent Pakistan, Turkey gave the United States a fighting chance to help reconcile Islamic societies with modern democracy, and this, he said, was the long-range hope to outgrow the backward drag of tyrannical fundamentalists. For Clinton, Bosnia mattered in part because of repercussions in the pivotal Muslim nations. I asked whether Ciller of Turkey tried to make Bosnia a contingent factor in their private negotiations. No, he replied, but Bosnia did permeate their conversations. He said it affected her personally and politically, citing verified reports that Ciller had walked openly through the cratered streets of Sarajevo while it was being shelled, together with Pakistan’s prime minister, Benazir Bhutto. For these two gutsy women, said the president, Bosnia was more than a religious kinship. Bosnia tested their reform platforms against fundamentalist propaganda that Western democracy was a facade for corrupt, postcolonial domination of Muslim nations.
In Bosnia, Serb gunners had just pulled back from besieged Gorazde under the NATO ultimatum. The president flinched when I mentioned that New York senator Pat Moynihan was calling for the United States to lift the international arms embargo unilaterally so that the Bosnians could fight for themselves. “That’s just a freebie for him,” snapped Clinton, “and he knows it.” Moynihan made headlines by belittling the tenuous, hard-won reprieve for Gorazde, and he played politics by advocating steps that sounded tough but risked and accomplished nothing. The president said Moynihan understood all the reasons why his recommended course would be wrong. First, “unilateral lift” was a euphemism for violating the embargo. Doing so would compel Russia and other countries to send offsetting weapons to the Serbs, and it would undermine international compacts all over the world. Clinton said the right way to lift the embargo was by repeal at the United Nations, where it originated. Repeal there might be possible, he added, because Russia and Serbia had come to resent the notorious blood lust and greed of their Bosnian Serb allies. (They had helped force the siege gunners back from Gorazde.) Still, Clinton expressed new misgivings about any “responsible” lift of the embargo. If repeal was accomplished, NATO and the U.N. would extract peacekeepers swiftly from the crossfire, and Serb forces would press their advantage before the Bosnians could import weapons to defend themselves. In effect, the world would abandon Bosnia to let the three ethnic armies fight it out. Clinton predicted that such a grim precedent would haunt us there and elsewhere.
He thought Moynihan’s sly outburst betrayed early anxiety for the 1994 election. Several incumbent Democratic senators had vented political worries to Clinton on a recent retreat in Colonial Williamsburg. They complained of being pilloried by association with the president, whose biggest triumph—the anti-deficit package—was called nothing but a tax increase. They said the National Rifle Association was hammering them over the Brady Bill and the ongoing drive to ban assault weapons. Clinton reeled off Democratic figures by state on the NRA’s laserlike powers of retribution. He said Harris Wofford of Pennsylvania was in trouble. So was Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey, and Virginia’s Chuck Robb confided that he might not survive a challenge in the Democratic primary.
The president summoned up gallows humor from these political woes. On the retreat, he said, the other senators had marveled in whispers at Robb’s strange decision, upon hearing that the Washington Post was investigating his private life, to release a preemptive confession of misdeeds back into his tenure as governor—where and why he had been around illegal drugs at wild parties, which specific sex acts he considered outright adultery as opposed to lesser sins like petting, and how he squared all this with his wife, Lynda, daughter of the late President Lyndon Johnson. Clinton said they attributed the political mistake to Robb’s spartan reserve as a stiffly formal ex-Marine, unforgiving toward himself. Way out on a Williamsburg golf course, he recalled, two foursomes of senators rushed up to an outdoor relief station. They deferred to the president, who entered the men’s room alone, but Senator Robb was in such distress that he yelled to find out if there were any women using the other side. Just then, trying to be helpful, Clinton called out—“There’s two in here!”—and Robb blushed crimson long after he realized that the president meant urinals instead of women. Clinton said he emerged to find all the senators, including Robb, dissolved in laughter.
Carolyn Huber came in while Clinton discussed Haiti. She had managed the governor’s mansion for the Clintons in Little Rock, and now showed him her preliminary edit of some 1,400 photographs from his brother, Roger’s, recent wedding at the Dallas Arboretum, featuring the president as best man and a radiant bride nearly seven months pregnant. Looking through the giant album, guided by Huber, Clinton said he had been irritated of late by “my diplomats.” They proposed to scuttle a package of tighter sanctions against Haiti’s military regime, telling Clinton that exiled President Aristide did not deserve such help just now because his partisans were criticizing U.S. refugee policy as racially biased in favor of white Cubans over black Haitians. The president sharply countermanded the diplomats. On the other hand, he refused to be bullied by the publicized hunger strike of anti-apartheid activist Randall Robinson, who had vowed for nearly three weeks not to eat again until Clinton did justice by Aristide. Robinson’s reported medical condition was sinking slowly, but Clinton cited a number of steps beyond sanctions that should give him reason not to starve himself. If Robinson wanted to commit suicide anyway, the president added rather coldly, that was his own business.
In a parallel conversation, Huber was pointing out photographs from the wedding of an adorable four-year-old with ugly head wounds. The president, much affected, said he had forgotten to write her family. Making a note to himself, he told me the girl had my name with a different spelling—he and Huber worked out something like “T-A-L-O-U-R”—and suffered from a disorder that caused her to pull out large patches of hair. Clinton rose to search his bedroom bookshelves intently. As he did, I tried to offer some encouragement about Haiti, where desperate refugees were again fleeing on flimsy rafts, but Clinton replied that most U.S. politicians saw no hope in the restoration of Aristide. They wanted to jettison him, even though his election victory was Haiti’s sole birth credential for democracy. Senator John Kerry (Democrat of Massachusetts) had urged Clinton the other night to secure Aristide’s resignation in exchange for the junta’s promise of new elections, and before I could respond, the president returned from his bedroom with a book about leprosy. He said the only U.S. leprosarium was in Carville, Louisiana, hometown of his political consultant James Carville, and this British author had studied lepers there for twenty-five years. Only 5 percent of the population lacked natural immunity to the disease. If exposed, 80 percent of new lepers would recover, but it was critical for the endangered few to heed their residual sense of pain. Otherwise, they would scrape off numb flesh from diminishing stumps.
Pain is your friend, said the president. Little Talour did not have leprosy, but he wanted to tell the family that her heartrending cries were a warning system against self-aggravated wounds and infection. His ongoing explanation further tongue-tied me. Could I, or should I, try to see some analogy between these horrible symptoms and Haiti—with its street executions and grisly mutilations, Robinson’s self-starvation, and our impulse to avoid the whole subject? Was there a concise insight to render Haiti’s political pain into something positive, even historic? If so, I could not find the words while Clinton and Huber were completing their tour of the wedding album, and we all left shortly thereafter. The president needed to work on tomorrow’s eulogy for Richard Nixon. Both of the former president’s daughters had called, asking him to speak even though it was not a state funeral. He wanted to address Nixon’s life as a whole, arguing that any lasting fault lay in his affront to the Constitution rather than any political differences, even about Vietnam.
President Clinton walked me across the hall to his elevator, with an arm around my shoulder. He kept saying that tonight’s session was pretty good, pretty valuable, and we were pretty well caught up. His comments seemed half-questions and half-statements, seeking reassurance for us both. I sensed that his mind was drifting somewhere else.