Thursday, May 4, 2000
Friday, July 14, 2000
A butler delivered me with four Excedrin to President Clinton, who did not feel well after a long hot day promoting charter schools in Minnesota. There had been only one such experiment in the whole country when he took office; now there were nearly two thousand. He was in the Solarium, finishing late dinner and a round of three-dimensional Scrabble with Hugh Rodham. They were also watching the telecast of an NBA playoff between the Indiana Pacers and Milwaukee Bucks, discussing where Arkansas might recruit a high school player taller than six feet eight inches, and occasionally consulting a heavy dictionary about borderline moves for UpWords. As Rodham hunched over its maze board of stacked letters, brooding in his strap T-shirt, the president tossed him suggestions. They played a Zen-like variation, he explained, stressing total score over individual competition. Tonight’s combined 1,100 points wound up 200 shy of their record. I warded off invitations to try for the three-way mark, and Clinton excused us to work in the third-floor hall.
Almost immediately, Hugh forwarded an incoming phone call from Hillary. Cardinal John O’Connor of New York had died yesterday, and Monday’s funeral at St. Patrick’s Cathedral would be a major event in the campaign year, attended by both presidential candidates and U.N. secretary-general Kofi Annan. “I’d rather take a whipping than go,” Clinton told Hillary. The cardinal had been vociferous against gay people, and hostile to any form of safe sex except abstinence. It was well known that he disliked Clinton, and had been practically a cheerleader for Hillary’s likely opponent, Mayor Giuliani. Still, this was an institutional funeral for the titular head of New York’s Catholics. The Clintons hashed over their options. They decided it would look less political if they went together. They could give each other some cover. Clinton sighed. “I’d still rather take a whipping,” he said.
The president had survived South Asia in March. On tape he stressed the political wounds and grievances lingering in India from our Cold War policy favoring her mortal enemy, Pakistan. He described labors to initiate a more evenhanded approach with all the tools of a state visit. He had agreed late to cancel one stop in Bangladesh—a helicopter trip to the village of Joypura—because of hard intelligence that Osama bin Laden had lined the route with assassins. They did not announce this threat, of course, which gave leeway for the traveling U.S. press corps to ascribe motives of cavalier indifference toward the poor (“Big Day Spoiled for Bangladesh Villagers”). At one colorful ceremony, Clinton did get to dance with mothers who had opened a cell phone cooperative on loans from Muhammad Yunus, inventor of micro-credit finance. This pioneer system, already of global significance, offered a joyful counterpoint to Bangladeshi national politics, which the president called essentially a blood feud between the camps of two women.*
* Sheikh Hasina Wazed (prime minister, 1996–2001 and 2009– ) was the daughter of Bangladesh’s founding father and first president, who had been assassinated with most of his family in a 1975 military coup. Khaleda Zia (prime minister, 1991–96 and 2001–06) was the widow of a military president killed in a 1981 countercoup. Like Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan, both charismatic rivals retained mass support despite chronic charges of corruption and vehement opposition from Muslim fundamentalists because of their sex.
The intelligence reports shifted in mid-trip. Bin Laden was said to have diverted some or all of his assassins from Bangladesh ahead to Pakistan. A covert “snatch team” raided one specific house near the airport runway in Islamabad, but bin Laden’s men escaped with a shoulder-fired Stinger missile. Then, said the president, his security team activated its most elaborate precautions. He felt bad for the pilots who flew an empty decoy plane with the markings of Air Force One, but this nerve-racking mission was their job. Clinton landed secretly off-schedule in an unmarked plane, taking with him the smallest functional entourage “consistent with the dignity of the United States.” On live television, he addressed the people of Pakistan (“Democracy cannot develop if it is constantly uprooted . . .”), and negotiated privately with General Musharraf about delicate topics from Kashmir and nuclear sanctions to terrorism. Early in April, days after Clinton’s departure, Pakistani courts sentenced the deposed prime minister Nawaz Sharif to life imprisonment rather than the gallows.*
* Sharif left prison within eight months, when Saudi Arabia accepted him into restricted exile. Nearly seven years later, under pressure to hold national elections late in 2007, General Musharraf allowed both the banished prime ministers, Sharif and Benazir Bhutto, back into Pakistan.
On his way home from Pakistan, the president stopped in Geneva to meet President Asad of Syria. This was largely a favor to Israeli prime minister Barak, who hoped to make up for his rebuff of Syrian overtures at Shepherdstown in January. Clinton brokered nonbinding ideas to rekindle Asad’s interest. Perhaps Syria could reclaim full sovereignty right up to the northern shore of Lake Tiberias—if Asad would lease back to Canada, or some other nonaligned nation, a negotiable buffer strip of empty land around the lake. This would soothe Israel’s concerns about water rights. The president had scarcely begun, he recalled on tape, when Asad declared the whole subject a waste of time. Asad misremembered or retracted prior positions. He seemed crotchety and weak, yet decisive—to the point that he cut the president short. No need to hear this, he snapped. His curt dismissal was a diplomatic insult, as well as a scalding surprise for dozens of Syrian, Israeli, and U.S. officials who had prepared a different summit. They scrambled to put the best face on the disaster.
Clinton groaned. He remained sure within himself that Asad’s desire to make peace, regaining the Golan Heights, had been genuine. Now he speculated that the shrewd but aging president simply lacked the imagination to escape his lifetime of slogans against Israel. Alternatively, Clinton thought Asad’s mortal preoccupation may have tilted from his own legacy to an uncertain succession for his young son Bashar. If he died soon, a fresh peace with Israel would make it harder for Bashar to control his Syrian military. Right now, Syria’s generals enjoyed a perpetual gravy train—a huge budget claim on their economy just to growl at the declared enemy next door, without much danger of an actual fight. Any peace might stir civilian and military discontent before Bashar could establish his own dominance. Asad’s people, the president informed me, came from a tiny sect of Shia Muslims confined almost entirely to Syria, the Alawites, comprising only 13 percent of Syria’s population. Like Saddam Hussein in Iraq, the Asad family ruled by ruthless coalitions built from a minority base.
Whatever its cause, the slap from Asad seemed to disturb President Clinton more than his personal hazards in South Asia. Perhaps it was the accumulated stress. While reeling off consequences, he crossed his legs in a lotus position on the hall sofa. Alternately, he wrenched one knee and the other upward next to his ear, punctuated by creaks and grimaces, while talking nonstop. I could not bring myself to interrupt. He said Barak was devastated, and Arafat was furious. The prime minister had hoped a Syrian peace would guarantee a cessation of Lebanese rocket attacks from Asad’s Hezbollah clients, cushioning the pullback at last of Israeli troops from southern Lebanon after eighteen years of costly, fruitless occupation. Instead of forward momentum on the Palestinian issue, Barak faced political scorn at home and a united wave of machismo from Arab nations, which cheered Asad for defying Israel and the mighty United States.
Arafat seethed. From his point of view, he had labored years to prove himself a worthy peace partner, only to be relegated last behind Syria and then swamped by Palestinian acclaim for Asad, of all people, who had done nothing but sneer and say no. Clinton described April meetings at the White House with Barak, then Arafat. The seven-year window from the Oslo Accords was set to expire in September, when Arafat would face pressure to make an empty declaration of Palestinian statehood. Barak would counter by reinforcing and annexing the occupied West Bank. After all this, Clinton said there may be no peace while he was in office. It was very sad.
I offered leavening jokes, including one in poor taste about whether Billy Graham could unsnarl some religious disputes over Jerusalem. The president continued with a disapproving flinch. His mood did lift when asked about his first starring film role, a four-minute short made with producers from the television comedy Everybody Loves Raymond. Clinton played a dysfunctional president who was learning useful chores at last. He demonstrated, for instance, how to elbow a vending machine in the White House basement for free sodas, and he made sack lunches for a busy first lady as “Miss Hillary’s Helper.” This film was a smash hit at the White House Correspondents Dinner, hosted by Jay Leno, showing off Clinton’s ability to laugh at himself in the twilight of an embattled presidency, helping to spike his job performance ratings well above 60 percent and his personal approval back near 60, which, he said, marked recovery from the Lewinsky scandal.
No, he did not think it would rescue his legislative agenda. Congress did not pay much attention unless adverse polls struck members directly, and Clinton said Republicans had decided to make the Senate their obstreperous body this year, given a safe ten-seat margin, letting the House make nice. He was grateful for House passage of his Africa and Caribbean trade bills, which led to a digression on policy distinctions between the Central American big banana and the Caribbean small banana. The Republican strategy, he concluded, was to block all judicial confirmations, defeat his bills, demand enormous tax cuts instead of modest ones, and see what the election would bring.
THE PRESIDENT FRETTED in spurts about Al Gore’s campaign to succeed him. He thought Gore had made a basic mistake by letting the August convention get maneuvered into Los Angeles. Democrats might as well quit if they needed a boost to win California, and a Philadelphia convention would have challenged the GOP head-to-head from the rust belt into New England. Less sharply, Clinton said Gore got himself hammered from both sides of the Elian González controversy—first upholding the immigration law, then caving to Cuban-American demands for an “adopt-Elian” bill. He and Gore had clawed to put Florida’s electoral votes within reach. They moved the southern military command to Miami, invested heavily to save the Everglades, and worked to reduce the GOP’s pandering advantage among Cuban-Americans, who were 12 percent of the state’s crucial electorate.
The soap opera over Elian ruined all this, said Clinton, even though reality defied media stereotype. Florida governor Jeb Bush privately complained that the Miami relatives holding Elian seemed unstable, threatening popular revolt and guerrilla resistance before they would surrender him for a custody hearing. Attorney General Reno’s own secretary refused to speak to her, and several of Reno’s closest friends knew—or were themselves—children sacrificed by their families to be free outside Cuba. They denounced her legal duty. Two weeks ago, Reno had reported past midnight on tense negotiations toward peaceful compliance, but John Podesta woke Clinton with notice that she was sending in a SWAT team. Something happened to snap her patience, or convince her that further delay risked safety. The extraction raid lasted less than three minutes, without shots fired or blows struck, but hysteria erupted over “Gestapo tactics” to benefit Castro. Clinton predicted, accurately, that the U.S. Supreme Court soon would mandate Elian’s return to his father in Cuba. Political fallout would last for years. To his credit, said the president, Gore did not blame him for letting the law take its course.
Gore had drifted for six weeks since his skillful dispatch of Bill Bradley in the Democratic primaries, granting a truce for George W. Bush to overhaul his image after the gutter tactics against John McCain. A new Bush wandered free, scoffed Clinton, posing for photographs with people of color, talking daily about the environment and education reform, promising to extend the current prosperity without its partisan rancor and debilitating scandal. Bush had established a campaign of style over substance, based on the false premise that progress comes easy. You cannot allow that, said Clinton. Even while formulating themes for a general campaign, Gore must dispute his opponent’s self-portrait. Bush had no credible record on the environment, nor on race, nor much platform on any tough issue for the future. The president spoke more harshly than before. He called Bush an empty suit, meaner than his dad. Clearly, if elected, Bush would take the country in a sharply different direction—back to deficits through large tax cuts, with environmental standards gutted, more government secrecy, and welcome restored for the NRA and tobacco companies. This choice was submerged in public debate, fumed Clinton, because Gore allowed Bush to get by on shadow puppets and his squinty smile.
Clinton still thought Gore would win. Most people considered him smart, experienced, and motivated. He examined the pitfalls for Gore in a campaign showcasing presidential character over detailed agendas for the country. Reporters called Gore “stiff,” but Clinton discounted this liability. He thought Gore’s droll sense of humor would wear well over time. Gore also was perceived to be too conventional a Democrat, therefore lacking independence, which called for Gore to emphasize more his own passions and initiatives. Then the president said Gore could have a brooding quality about him, not worrisome or off-putting in itself, but potentially damaging if his serious nature failed to give voters a lift. Clinton isolated the word “sunny.” Gore needed more of it. Other things being equal, voters tended to prefer the candidate with a sunnier, more positive disposition. The great exception in our lifetime was Nixon over Humphrey in 1968, for peculiar reasons, but Reagan had been funnier than Carter or Mondale, Bush sunnier than Dukakis in 1988.
Clinton thought Gore could make adjustments in this area. Stress to voters the upside of his policies in their everyday lives. Choose a running mate with a complementary, upbeat nature. Just today, the president said, he had called Warren Christopher, the former secretary of state, who was heading Gore’s vice presidential search team, to recommend that Gore consciously include temperament to balance the Democratic ticket. In 1992, critics had faulted Clinton for choosing Gore—another small-state, white Southern moderate—but Gore had balanced Clinton in more important aspects than geography and ideology. Gore was deliberative, as against Clinton’s instinctual approach. Gore knew Washington. Believe me, said the president, his administration would have made many more errors in the first two years had it not been for the vice president. Now he was advising Christopher to look for a bright spirit to balance Gore. If the running mate had to come from Washington, he suggested, make it someone with a tonic gift like Senator Richard Durbin of Illinois.
We flashed back to bull sessions with Gore, which the president enjoyed immensely. My dictation was fuzzy about what triggered the recap, but their dynastic dreams and investigations had explored the origins of the Democratic Party with three consecutive two-term presidents: Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe. Clinton and Gore mined lessons from these illustrious forebears. Their personalities varied greatly. Of the three, only Monroe was a naturally gifted politician, and their continuity survived adjustments—even major mistakes. Clinton thought Jefferson, for instance, was on the wrong side of many early disputes with Alexander Hamilton about the necessary institutions for republican government. He saw in Jefferson a slow convert to nationalism for the Louisiana Purchase, negotiated in part by his young envoy James Monroe. From an unstable mix of agrarian fantasy, states’ rights for slaveholders, and sympathy for French revolutionaries against British aristocrats, the three party founders forged an abiding political tradition. Their progressive nationalism had established the young country until the crisis over slavery. Modernized, it could guide the Democratic Party out of political retrenchment since the 1960s. Clinton and Gore hoped to build on each other like the triumvirate from Virginia.
I asked a question about the upheavals in Iran. Moderates had won overwhelming victories in recent parliamentary elections, but fundamentalists from the Islamic revolution of 1979 clung to their positions in the courts, military, police, and intelligence agencies. Essentially, said Clinton, Iran had two governments. He paid tribute to those who protested the repression of their representatives. They maintained peaceful demonstrations in the streets, knowing they had a popular majority, but it was hard to know how long they could resist authoritarian control. For the present, he said, diplomatic encouragement tended to backfire against the moderates. Saheed Hajjarian, Iran’s leading reform theorist, had been shot in the face and paralyzed in an ambush, and the Islamic courts conducted show trials of Iranian Jews charged with spying for Israel. Not entirely as a joke, he likened Iran’s mullahs to the hard-line Republicans who tormented him with a succession of special prosecutors. An ideological faction had converted key government powers into a political weapon, impervious to checks and balances.
Midnight passed. We ran out of major topics, and the president veered into stories of his own. He described an education tour into Owensboro, Kentucky, reading Charlotte’s Web with children whose test scores had soared since class size was reduced from forty to fifteen. He spoke a few words of Navajo learned on his “digital divide” trip to Shiprock, New Mexico. Myra Jodie, an articulate thirteen-year-old, told Clinton of winning a computer in a contest but being unable to access the Internet because her mother, like 78 percent of Navajos, had no telephone service. The publicity attracted a host of satellite companies to donate Internet connections to the Navajo families, some of whom had occupied the same land for a thousand years. Just before Shiprock, the president volunteered, he had detoured from California fund-raisers and a full presidential schedule to stop by Stanford, where Chelsea took him to a class. Her professor mentioned that the students were reading one of my books, Parting the Waters, which gave Clinton a chance to tell them how he and I came to know each other, and why the civil rights era meant so much to us. He said it was very moving.
I purred like a fool but fortunately said nothing as he rushed on to his point, battling emotion. For two years, Chelsea had met him at California sites away from the Stanford campus—usually at the secluded home of a donor. She had been loyal even when angry and hurt, but her true feelings quarantined him from her college friends. He understood why. Since the Lewinsky scandal, Clinton said, he had felt worse for Chelsea and worried more about her than anyone, including Hillary, because she had to endure the searing exposure of her father’s sex life at an age when peers meant the whole world. His presence at Stanford had been unbearable for her, which made it such a healing step to bring him again into their bubbling wit and enthusiasm. She seemed happy to have him back. “I can’t tell you how good that made me feel,” he said. Our session broke off. To transfer the finished tapes, I found him downstairs on the phone with Hillary, talking about the funeral for Cardinal O’Connor.
TWO MONTHS WENT by. Clinton was always out of the country, explained Nancy Hernreich, or raising money every night for Democratic candidates at home. Abruptly, a call about noon in July flipped an emergency switch. Could I drive to Camp David before three o’clock? The president was on the fourth day of negotiations between Arafat and Barak but had secured an afternoon window to preserve an account. Only cell phones made the breakneck journey feasible. Lost on empty back roads in western Maryland, deciphering faxed directions from Washington instead of Baltimore, I found enough patches of cellular service to home in on an inconspicuous gate in the forest, which fed me through a gauntlet of roadside checkpoints—American, Israeli, Palestinian—with the tape recorders drawing attention and long-handled mirrors poked in and under every crevice of my car. A golf cart transported me across a hilly, wooded camp, with off-duty soldiers jogging along paths patrolled by agents with radio earpieces, vigilant but serene like summer counselors. My escort, a new graduate of Duke, pointed out extra counselors around Dogwood Cabin, where Barak was staying, and Palestinians outside Arafat’s Birch Cabin, which Vice President Gore normally occupied. I emerged from a final security zone into the rustic sanctum of Aspen Lodge.
President Clinton and Chelsea were finishing a late lunch at the table next to a half-completed jigsaw puzzle. His T-shirt read, “Trust me, I’m a reporter.” Hers featured a big deer face with liquid eyes. He rose up from his crossword with a smile and an expansive welcome to Camp David, pointing through glass doors and windows to the pool and the Eisenhower golf hole, which he said you could play from three different tee boxes in the clearings below. He frowned at a golf bag on the patio, getting wet in the rain, and thanked me for coming on short notice. I said I had absorbed very little about the place yet, being rattled by delays and the unfamiliar security for this three-way summit. To my annoyance, he had heard I had gotten lost. It was now three-thirty, and he sent mixed signals. His time was short, but he was no longer sure what, if anything, he wanted to record about the Middle East talks. Regardless, he had to make some political calls before we started. Some nut had called Hillary an anti-Semite in the New York campaign.
I sat down near Chelsea to prepare the notes and recorders, taping Clinton’s side of at least one strategy call. She inquired politely about Macy and Franklin, then asked about a book from my briefcase by Patrick O’Brian, who wrote about the British navy during its wars with Napoleon. She mentioned her favorite historical novelist, Dorothy Dunnett, whose tales were set a few centuries earlier in northern Europe. Asked about Stanford, she said all that remained for her senior year was a thesis on literature pertaining to Ireland. We discussed possible topics. She was fascinated by Rudyard Kipling’s condescension toward the Irish as an inferior species, fit to be cogs in the British Empire.
I told her my work on the King years had taken me back through pseudoscience from the imperial and colonial eras, when Kipling flourished, and Chelsea picked right up on a virulent strain of “Ivy League racism.” She was aware that Long Island’s Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, now famous for DNA discoveries, had been founded in 1900 to sort all humanity beneath superior traits presumed for the Anglo-Saxon breed. She traced its eugenics movement behind our hierarchical immigration law of 1924, which had excluded whole swaths of the globe through Asia and Africa, curtailing legal entry even from “swarthy” European countries such as Greece. We shared an appreciation for Lyndon Johnson’s unheralded reform law in 1965, which finally repealed the eugenics-based filter on legal immigration into the United States.
Had the president told Chelsea what we were trying to accomplish with the oral history tapes? When she said yes, I invited her to join us today. Lately, I had been trying to elicit a bit more general reflection, looking back, but the whole process was guesswork. Secrecy precluded any consultation to refine the priorities we carved ad hoc from the president’s time. If Chelsea wanted him to address a neglected subject, or felt some particular answer might be valuable on the record years hence, she should speak up. Thank you, she replied, curious enough to stay on and see.
The president summarized Hillary’s campaign crisis on tape, and paused to take another political call. Because he seemed distracted, and still hesitant to talk about the Middle East, I asked about June’s breakthrough summit in Pyongyang between the two warring Koreas. Clinton beamed. “We’ve been working on that for a long time,” he said. Observers on both sides collapsed in disbelief that civil contact took place. South Korea’s president, Kim Dae-jung, deserved enormous credit for his lifetime crusade to break down the lethal hostility between his capitalist showcase and the starkly desperate, nuclear-tinged pariah in the north. Clinton said Kim briefed him afterward by phone, and sent his intelligence chief to report personally at the White House. The South Koreans found “the northern Kim”—North Korea’s dictator, Kim Jong-il—surprisingly well informed and balanced about the outside world. His delusional behavior must be partly calculated. North Korea, facing starvation even for its high-ration soldiers, craved normal trade with the West, especially the United States, and Clinton thought the summit validated his five-year policy of demanding normalization first with South Korea. Until then, by forcing the North Koreans to deal with us through Kim Dae-jung, we would use our leverage to defuse one of the world’s ticking bombs.
He said self-government in Northern Ireland was “up and running again,” thanks to an elaborate construct of face-saving measures to neutralize the IRA’s terrorist weapons without outright surrender. Ulster’s Unionist Party narrowly voted to accept an international inspection certifying the weapons “beyond use,” which allowed Tony Blair to withdraw England’s soldiers again. IRA hotheads wanted to fight on for union with Catholic Ireland, while Protestant foes marched to restore their cherished rule under British protection, but the great mass of citizens steadfastly demanded peace from the unity government. Progress in Northern Ireland came slowly and in fits—maddening and inspirational, silly and mundane—leaving Clinton upbeat but tentative about its long-term miracle.
By contrast, he was melancholy over Cuba. The U.S. courts had sent young Elian González home to his father. Political tension was thick. The president said he was nursing one long-shot scheme to seize a few million dollars of Cuban assets somewhere in the world. Then, applying those funds to the wrongful death claims over the four pilots shot down by Castro in 1996, he could move around that land mine of terrorist debt to dismantle our forty-year-old economic embargo. Far more likely, the embargo would outlast his term in office. Strangely, he remarked, Vietnamese exiles pursued the same goal as Cuban-Americans by the opposite strategy. They agitated constantly to establish U.S. trade with Vietnam, aiming to liberate their Communist homeland through commerce. This idea was anathema to most Cubans, who thought they could strangle Fidel Castro somehow with a cold shoulder.
Six weeks ago, Prime Minister Barak of Israel had intercepted Clinton in Portugal to plead for the Middle East summit being held now at Camp David. The president skipped over the issues and terms to recall his own twenty-one-gun salute from warships and shore batteries on arrival in Lisbon Harbor, with enough pageantry, he laughed, to make him feel like a real president. From meetings of the European Union, he played golf on a gorgeous mountain course with Portuguese prime minister António Guterres, one of the handful of peers—along with Yeltsin, Blair, Kohl, Mandela, Zedillo of Mexico, and a few others—with whom Clinton felt he had established a strong personal connection. He continued to Aachen, Germany, where he received the Charlemagne Prize for European leadership, recording details of the chapel there attended by Charlemagne himself some 1,200 years ago. Clinton saw Chancellor Gerhard Schröder in Berlin, along with his old friend Kohl, whose health was failing badly, and proceeded to Moscow one month after the inauguration of Vladimir Putin as Yeltsin’s elected successor.
They had agreed jointly to destroy thirty-four tons of weapons-grade plutonium, which did make news, but the president dwelled on his impressions of Putin. He called him smoothly commanding—an unfinished work. After dinner in an elegant chamber at the Kremlin, Putin presented a private concert of big-band jazz starring Igor Butman. “I never heard Coltrane live,” conceded Clinton, listing other immortals on his own chosen instrument, but Butman mesmerized him like no other tenor saxophone player on earth. Putin cut through the music with words of ice. Ten years after the Soviet collapse, he told Clinton, Russia was a carcass. His vows to rebuild evoked the Russian empire, despite careful disclaimers. The president said he was not sure yet about Putin. Certainly, they were on guard at his next stop in Kiev, capital of Ukraine, whose sixty million people felt obscured by Moscow’s shadow. I asked what had been needed from the United States to close the poisonous sore at Chernobyl, near the Ukrainian town of Pripyat, fourteen years after the world’s worst nuclear disaster. “Money,” he replied.
HOME FROM THE long trip, barely touching down to receive the king of Jordan—for advisory preparations toward this Camp David summit on Abdullah’s Palestinian flank—he had flown to the funeral of Japanese prime minister Keizo Obuchi. The choice to attend meant a grueling eighteen-hour flight, eight hours on the ground at Tokyo’s Budokan arena, and eighteen hours back to the White House for the eleventh bilateral meeting with Mexico’s president, Ernesto Zedillo. Well, Clinton kept saying, it was worth the effort many times over. The Japanese are a very sensitive people. Ten years ago, they felt positioned to dominate the global economy, buying up New York and London, but their financial model suffered a bewildering collapse that their government could not repair. Japanese politics had chewed up six prime ministers during his term, said Clinton, of whom Obuchi was by far the most promising until a fatal stroke. Everybody in Japan knew Obuchi had been inspired into public service by a 1963 encounter with Attorney General Robert Kennedy, which made the U.S. partnership poignant.
With national confidence shattered, said Clinton, Japanese culture preserved the bonding ritual of a state funeral built on Shinto tradition. In a gigantic walled backdrop of woven yellow flowers—millions of them—rays of red blossoms fed down to a central burst of the rising sun, where Obuchi’s ashes were placed on a platform with six empty chairs for the family of Emperor Akihito. Enraptured, the president described the ceremonial mood and protocol. He quoted poetic eulogies verbatim. He recalled the gestures in a procession up the long ramp—a bow to Mrs. Obuchi, a bow to the ashes, a bow to the sun. Hours later, after his business retreat with the sadly inept new prime minister, Yoshiro Mori, children and ordinary citizens still moved solemnly up the ramp. In Japan, said Clinton, this great occasion lasted so long as anyone wished to place a flower near the departing leader’s ashes.
The president took a bathroom break, during which I asked Chelsea if she had heard these stories. She said no. I had found it harder this year to steer him to other subjects, because the newspapers were preserving only the most cursory record of his travel abroad. Did she understand his reluctance to discuss the current summit, which I had thought was a prime purpose for this session? She could only guess that he was skittish about unpredictable demands from so many working groups. She said I had probably not noticed, with my back to the picture window, but a sound crew had been setting up on the covered patio for him to record tomorrow’s national radio address.
When the president returned, I made one more stab by asking if President Asad’s death on June 10 would influence these talks. Not much, he said. He was very disappointed in Asad, whose son Bashar now was establishing his Arab bona fides by barking at Israel. Then the president recorded roughly fifteen minutes about Camp David. He said Barak had come to Lisbon pleading for this summit in order to leap over the backward drift of his negotiations with the Palestinians. Arafat strongly resisted for the same reason: backward drift. There was not enough progress to justify a summit, which Arafat feared would fail. He said Barak did not even honor previous commitments to release some prisoners and transfer jurisdiction for three Israeli-occupied Palestinian villages in East Jerusalem. Barak had not wished to take the political hit for such steps while he was concentrating on Syria. Now Barak said he was ready to make up for it, but Arafat fumed that Barak had parked him behind Asad, for nothing, and withdrawn Israeli troops from Lebanon, for free, which rendered Arafat a laughingstock among Arabs.
For these first four days at Camp David, said Clinton, the Israeli and Palestinian delegations mostly had sulked. But pressure was building. “This is not a holding pattern,” he kept saying. There could be no option to set things aside for later, as everyone believed failure would lead to deterioration of “facts on the ground.” He had a whole encyclopedia in mind about the negotiating gaps and strategies, but it should wait. Not enough had happened yet, and he wanted to be able to say he had not discussed the details with another soul. There had been no leaks.
Finally, the president said he had just received an extraordinary briefing. Every now and then, the CIA did something to make you realize that its business did not always pervert the word “intelligence,” and this unnamed guy had earned Clinton’s respect with a gripping portrayal of mortal fears at Camp David. Both delegations were acutely conscious that predecessors had been killed by their own people—Sadat in Egypt, Rabin in Israel—and the CIA official described their internal suspects and suspicions, down to the triggering issues for various plots, centered on religious and national identity. There was a sharper edge than at Shepherdstown, where Clinton had hoped he could drag a compromise over the finish line. Even subordinates had their necks on the line.
John Podesta popped in with the script for the radio address. Secretary of State Albright stood expectantly at the window. Hurriedly, I asked Chelsea if we had missed anything vital. “Tell him about the Fourth of July,” she said, and he described their early rise at Chappaqua for a sail with Hillary down the Hudson River to view a breathtaking armada of tall ships—more than the Bicentennial in 1976—and on to a naturalization ceremony at which Janet Reno swore in new American citizens from all over the world. Yes, and he reprised an unforgettable introduction there by one of them, a naval officer who had immigrated to Brooklyn as a child. She still sent money to her mother back home in Guatemala. No, Chelsea corrected, the Dominican Republic. Clinton nodded. The young officer said her mother lived alone in a village so remote that it took her a day’s walk to pick up the mail.
Clinton stepped out to record the radio address: five minutes, without a stumble or hitch, on why he would veto a bill to repeal the estate tax, which would add $750 billion in national debt over ten years, payable to the wealthiest Americans. Podesta asked quietly if we could help the president improve his advisory report on race. Sandy Berger said there were troubles ahead over the comeback election of Aristide in Haiti. The president returned and drew me aside. Could I keep these two tapes for now and return them next time? Of course, and good luck here. I went outside. Aides thought I was instructed to stay overnight. No one knew where my car was parked. While sorting out the logistics, they stowed me in the jammed Shangri-La Bar at Hickory Cabin. A sign there advertised one-dollar haircuts, and a ship’s bell, by Navy tradition, obliged anyone caught wearing a hat to buy drinks for the house.