Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton (12 page)

By her own account, Chelsea had been watching television at her friend’s apartment in Union Square when the second plane hit, and quickly tried to call her mother in Washington—but as she spoke with an aide in Hillary’s office, overburdened phone lines went dead. In a panic, she left the apartment and headed downtown, searching desperately for a pay phone to reach Hillary’s Senate office again. She was standing in line at a pay phone, about twelve blocks from the disaster scene, when she heard the deafening roar of the second tower collapsing. She headed back toward Union Square, eventually found her friend, and they walked uptown, like thousands of other New Yorkers. When she found a working phone and reached Hillary, her mother burst into tears of relief.

At Clinton’s office in Harlem, Karen Tramontano and members of the foundation staff were meeting in a conference room with a panoramic southward view when they saw the first plane. Someone came running into the room and suddenly they were watching the catastrophe on television. Tramontano picked up a phone immediately, trying to reach Band in Australia.

With all flights into the United States canceled, the Clinton entourage was stranded in Australia. After talking with Band, Tramontano placed a call to Condoleezza Rice to ask for help. After some wrangling that involved more calls from Band to the Secret Service and to Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, the Pentagon dispatched a military aircraft to pick them up at Cairns Airport in Port Douglas. “It won’t be very comfortable,” Rice warned, “but it’s the only plane we have available out there right away.”

It wasn’t comfortable at all aboard the C-130 cargo plane and the trip took almost twenty-four hours. There were no seats, there was no food, and at thirty thousand feet, the interior of the plane was cold—very, very cold. They stopped in Guam and switched to a refueling plane, which was no better. Band had tried to scrounge some sweaters and other warm clothing at the hotel, but they were all bone-chilled, starved, and exhausted when the plane finally landed at Stewart Airport, a New York National Guard airbase about fifty miles north of Chappaqua. Almost immediately they departed for Manhattan, where they headed to Union Square.

Despite their ordeal, Clinton was grateful to have gotten home, unlike thousands of Americans left overseas with no way to return until the airports reopened. Among them was Al Gore, who had been in Vienna when the terrorists struck, giving a speech to an Austrian Internet forum.

Evidently the Bush White House was not prepared to provide military transportation for the former vice president, who could find no way to get back except via Gander Airport, a tiny facility in Newfoundland. From there, he and an aide would have to drive southward across the Canadian border.

While seeking help with their predicament, a former Gore aide—who had also worked in the Clinton White House—called the Harlem office. Gore and Clinton had exchanged messages within the first hours after the terrorist attack, but had not spoken yet. Distant as relations between their bosses had become, the staffers remained friendly. When Gore’s aide reached Tramontano, they talked casually about “the crap that’s gone on for far too long” between Gore and Clinton—who literally had not spoken since a bitter two-hour argument about who was to blame for the disastrous outcome of the 2000 election. She suggested that on the long drive down from the Canadian border, Gore might stop in Chappaqua.

When Tramontano reached Clinton to discuss the proposed sleepover, she wasn’t surprised by his enthusiasm. That evening around 8 p.m., the former vice president picked up his cell phone to speak with the former president for the first time in many months.

“Why don’t you come down here, and then we’ll fly down together Friday morning?” Clinton asked. An Air Force jet provided by the White House would take them to the capital for the special memorial service on September 14 at the National Cathedral.

Hours after midnight, driving a rented car, Gore arrived at the five-bedroom colonial on Old House Lane. Clinton was waiting for them in the living room, where he had been napping on and off, and got up to greet Gore.

As he climbed the steps to the front porch, the former vice president noticed a refrigerator, sitting where it had been moved while the kitchen was undergoing renovation—a tableau that struck him as more hillbilly Ozarks than chic Westchester. Eyeing the fridge, he
cracked, one Southerner to another: “Well, you’ve really come a long way, haven’t you?” At the door, Clinton roared with laughter.

They stayed up almost until dawn, talking mostly about the 9/11 attacks, their own efforts to deal with terrorism, and the murky times ahead. Chelsea met them in the morning at Westchester Airport to fly to Washington. On the flight down, Gore invited the Clintons to join his family after the memorial service for lunch at his home in Arlington, Virginia.

At the cathedral, a century-old Gothic Revival structure on the northern outskirts of the capital, Clinton sat in a front pew alongside President Bush and the other living former presidents, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and George H. W. Bush. He listened as the president delivered words of compassion for the bereaved and a warning to the enemy. He was speaking out forcefully in support of Bush at every opportunity, starting with his departure from Australia. He had canceled all of his speaking engagements abroad to remain in Manhattan, spending hours at local vigils and especially at the Armory on Park Avenue, where he tried to comfort families whose loved ones were missing and presumed dead.

“They cheered, they wept, they hugged him,” wrote a reporter for London’s
Daily Mirror
. “All around him, New Yorkers gathered, some to pass on their thanks that he had rushed to their side, others to grab his hand and use him as an emotional crutch. . . . All felt lifted to be in the presence of the man they had looked to for most of the past decade when their country was in its hour of need.”

The
Mirror
correspondent was not alone in contrasting Clinton’s instinctive leadership with the unsteadiness displayed by his successor in the early hours following the attack, although Bush soon righted himself and took command. America and the world had turned a page, moving beyond the petty controversies that had almost consumed Clinton in the days after he left office. Gaunt, somber, and worried, he and his fellow Americans now found themselves in a very different world.

Not everyone was willing to leave old habits behind, however, especially among Clinton’s most rigid detractors on the right. Even as Bush and congressional leaders prayed for the nation to unite, the habitual haters simply could not resist a fresh opportunity to target him.
Nothing mattered more than proving (or at least asserting) that the terrorist attacks of September 11 should be blamed not on the current president, but the one who preceded him. Before long a writer for
National Review
warned, only half-jokingly: “If we members of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy don’t get back to our daily routine of obsessive Clinton-bashing, then the terrorists will have won.”

CHAPTER FOUR

For years afterward, many commentators on American life would refer to 9/11 as “the day everything changed,” a phrase meant to mark that stunning moment when the nation awoke from its debilitating obsession with trivia and confronted existential threats. The act of terror, followed by war, and all that came thundering in their wake, instantly overshadowed the “scandal” mentality that had long dominated news coverage, political analysis, and commentary. Suddenly, the sustained hysteria over such banal concerns as the Whitewater land deal and the Monica Lewinsky affair seemed shamefully misguided. Even a few leading figures in the Washington press corps were glimpsed briefly flagellating themselves for those sins.

The national mood of reflection and humility did not linger too long, however, especially concerning the subject of William Jefferson Clinton. Scarcely taking breath after the terrorist attacks, while the rest of the country mourned, Clinton’s dedicated adversaries seized upon 9/11 as an opportunity to resume their pursuit of “the politics of personal destruction” that blighted public discourse during his eight years in the White House. With a powerful impulse to blame someone in authority—at a moment when nobody dared to scrutinize the actions of George W. Bush, commander-in-chief—the former president became an irresistible target.

Representative Dana Rohrabacher, a Republican from Laguna Beach, California, literally couldn’t resist for more than a few hours. At a news conference on September 11, Rohrabacher explained that the disaster’s underlying cause was simple: “We had Bill Clinton backing off, letting the Taliban go, over and over again.” The right-wing congressman may have hoped that if blame fell on Clinton, nobody would remember how Rohrabacher had once welcomed the Taliban’s seizure of power, praising the Islamist movement’s determination to “establish a disciplined, moral society” that would emphasize “stability.”

Others on the right swiftly joined the chorus of condemnation, from Newt Gingrich, who denounced Clinton’s “pathetically weak, ineffective ability to focus” on the terrorist threat, through an assortment of pundits and politicians—almost none of whom had paid much attention to terrorism, al Qaeda, or Osama bin Laden before September 12, 2001. Nearly all of them had been far too preoccupied during the previous nine years with the so-called Clinton scandals and peccadilloes that led to his impeachment. Many had opposed and even mocked Clinton administration initiatives against al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations.

By early October, perennial gadflies such as Paul Greenberg of the
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
were regularly stinging Clinton, saying he had “mainly only talked about terrorism” while pursuing a policy that was “showy but pitiful.” The
Washington Times
editorial board opined that “much of the time Mr. Clinton spent fighting to save his own political hide would have been far better spent fighting the bin Ladens of the world.” Rush Limbaugh weighed in with a
Wall Street Journal
essay that held Clinton “culpable for not doing enough when he was commander-in-chief to combat the terrorists who wound up attacking the World Trade Center and Pentagon.”

Although little noted for his national security expertise, Limbaugh had made an obvious point: The success of the attackers meant, by definition, that Clinton had not done enough to protect the United States from al Qaeda before September 11. The question of whether Clinton’s successor had “done enough” in the eight months before the attack—or done anything at all—would not be addressed for years to come, and then only in the face of a concerted cover-up by George W. Bush and his administration. As Bush prepared to invade Afghanistan, with the support of well over 90 percent of the American public, he enjoyed an extraordinary exemption from criticism by the national press corps, Democrats on Capitol Hill—and Clinton himself.

In
USA Today
, the verdict on whether Clinton “could have done more to stop bin Laden” lacked “black-and-white clarity,” but reporter Susan Page emphasized that “fighting terrorism wasn’t his highest priority.” When bin Laden emerged as “the mastermind of plots against Americans” during his second term, Clinton was “enmeshed in the Monica Lewinsky scandal and impeachment.” Page didn’t exam
ine whether fighting terrorism had been a top priority for Bush and Cheney during the months before 9/11.

While the
Washington Post
noted that a “particularly acrid” debate had commenced over responsibility for 9/11, “the outcome of which could weigh heavily on Clinton’s legacy,” the argument remained rather lopsided. As the national media examined the history of U.S. counterterrorism efforts, Clinton critics seized upon every purported lapse, while erasing every nuance, detail, and doubt to renew their public arraignment of him.

Having rarely underestimated the bitterness of his enemies, Clinton was nevertheless stunned by the right-wing effort, in the wake of a national catastrophe, to mount a show trial of him. Angered and shocked by their lack of restraint, even in the face of an event as grave as 9/11, he could only vent privately. If he or Al Gore had been in the Oval Office on that day, he told friends, Republicans would “never have offered me the support that Democrats have given President Bush.”

It amazed him to read that some of his most cynical assailants were blaming him for the first assault on the World Trade Center in February 1993. When that attack occurred nobody, least of all Clinton himself, had thought to blame George Herbert Walker Bush, the former president who had departed the Oval Office only six weeks earlier—despite the national intelligence shortcomings that had allowed a group of Islamist terrorists to plot for three years, undetected, the detonation of a truck-bomb in the basement of the complex.

But in the months following 9/11, the sheer volume of vilification from the right overwhelmed the halting defense of Clinton mounted by Democrats, including the former president and his aides. Sandy Berger, his former national security adviser, assured the
Washington Post
that counterterrorism “was an urgent priority for the Clinton administration, and the intelligence community specifically engaged in an intensive effort directed at bin Laden [and al Qaeda] across a range of fronts.” But as the
Post
’s John Harris observed in the same article, while conservatives were loudly denouncing Clinton, “there has been no corresponding effort on the Democratic side to argue opposing points—such as the successful quashing of terrorist attacks planned for the 2000 New Year.”

In a speech at Harvard University on November 20, Clinton ac
cepted broad responsibility for his administration’s failure to build closer ties with Muslim nations generally, and more specifically with Afghanistan after the Soviet occupation ended. “There is a war raging within Islam today about what they think about the modern world in general and the United States in particular,” he said. “We all have to change. The world’s poor cannot be led by people like Mr. bin Laden who think they can find their redemption in our destruction. But the world’s rich cannot be led by people who play to our shortsighted selfishness.” On that occasion he didn’t comment on the lengthy indictment compiled (and largely fabricated) by conservatives to demonstrate his “criminal negligence.”