Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton (13 page)

Among the most damaging and deceptive accusations was the claim that Clinton had repeatedly ignored opportunities to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. “The Sudanese government offered to hand over bin Laden to the United States,” wrote Andrew Sullivan, the former
New Republic
editor turned blogger. “Astonishingly, the Clinton administration turned the offer down.” This charge was based on a widely quoted (and misquoted) article published in the
Washington Post
on October 3—which said that Khartoum had offered to consider turning bin Laden over to the Saudi authorities, but only if Washington lifted sanctions on the Sudanese regime, designed to punish its genocidal campaign against Christians in its southern provinces. According to the
Post
, both the White House and the State Department sought to induce the Saudis to accept custody of bin Laden, a request that Riyadh adamantly rejected.

Nowhere did the carefully worded
Post
story suggest that Sudan agreed to deliver bin Laden into American custody, because that had never happened (except possibly in Sullivan’s imagination). Insisting on Clinton’s culpability, Sullivan and others claimed that he had allowed bin Laden to escape repeatedly—or had simply never tried to bring down the al Qaeda chief.

Explaining his alleged inattention to the terrorist threat, many of those same critics sneeringly cited his extramarital affair with Monica Lewinsky—and its aftermath, leading to his 1999 impeachment—as a self-inflicted distraction from the nation’s defense. Of course, when one of several attempts to kill bin Laden became public in August 1998, the same Republican critics insinuated that those famous cruise mis
sile strikes were launched to deflect public attention from his personal scandal. It never seemed to occur to those worthies that they were smearing not only the president but also several high-ranking intelligence and military officers, including General Anthony Zinni, who had urged the missile assault (and later joined the Bush administration as Mideast envoy). Earlier that year, in fact, Clinton had authorized an intensive, ongoing campaign to destroy al Qaeda and seize or assassinate bin Laden in a secret National Security Decision Directive. Later, he signed an executive order freezing $254 million in Taliban assets in the United States, while the State Department worked to maintain the regime’s international isolation.

That Clinton never succeeded in killing bin Laden was a problem of luck rather than will. The al Qaeda chieftain had escaped every one of several painstaking attempts on his life mounted by the CIA. Clinton had lacked the congressional and international support to order an invasion of Afghanistan, even if he had considered such action prudent. And as Bush later discovered—when U.S. forces invaded that country under his command—even with tens of thousands of American soldiers on the ground, including crack Special Forces units, rolling up the al Qaeda and Taliban leadership in hostile terrain was nearly impossible; both bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Omar escaped.

Echoing the right-wing chorus, Sullivan complained that Clinton “did little that was effective” against terrorism and “simply refused to do anything serious about the threat.” Leaving aside the secret campaign against bin Laden, however, the Clinton administration had in fact pursued several serious initiatives against terrorism, while his political adversaries directed their attention elsewhere. The former president’s first crime bill, submitted to Congress within months after the February 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, had included stringent new antiterrorism provisions—notably including stronger deportation authority and a federal death penalty for terrorists.

When Clinton sought to expand those protections in 1995, after the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, a coalition of civil libertarians and antigovernment conservatives argued that this “overreaction” posed a threat to constitutional rights and helped to defeat his bill. Then, at the urging of industry lobbyists, the Republican leadership rebuffed administration proposals to improve airport security
screening, to tighten controls on encryption software, and to close loopholes in offshore money-laundering laws. Any or all of those measures might have helped to prevent the 9/11 attacks.

Indeed, during a period when the public, the mainstream media, and most political leaders were paying little attention to terrorism, Clinton initiated or expanded several key programs to address the likelihood of a disastrous attack. From 1996 to 2001, federal spending on counterterrorism increased dramatically, to more than $12 billion annually. The FBI’s counterterrorism budget rose even more sharply, from $78 million in 1996 to $609 million in 2000, tripling the number of assigned special agents and creating a new counterterrorism center at the bureau’s Washington headquarters. Seemingly obsessed with the prospect of a biological attack, Clinton had increased spending on “domestic preparedness” programs from $42.6 million in 1997 to more than $1.2 billion in 2000.

In December 2000, a month before Clinton left office—and a year after his administration had thwarted the “Millennium Plot,” a major terrorist attack on the Los Angeles airport scheduled for New Year’s Eve 2000—the former ambassador for counterterrorism in the Reagan State Department, a career diplomat named Robert Oakley, had praised the Democratic president’s operations and programs. “Overall I give them very high marks,” Oakley told the
Washington Post
. “The only major criticism I have is the obsession with Osama, which has made him stronger.” Paul Bremer, who had succeeded Oakley in the same position under Reagan and later chaired the National Commission on Terrorism, mostly agreed—except that Bremer thought Clinton had “correctly focused on bin Laden.”

Had Clinton felt free to defend himself, he might have mentioned a number of those salient facts in public. He might have revealed, as he finally did years later, the highly personal, face-to-face warning about the looming menace of al Qaeda that he delivered to George W. Bush in the White House residence early in January 2001, with national security advisers to both men present, during the traditional “exit interview.” For reasons of post-presidential decorum and wartime solidarity, he didn’t feel at liberty to say anything that could be interpreted as a direct criticism of his successor. The complete account of their contrasting records concerning terrorism—before “everything changed”—
would unfold slowly over the coming years. That painful reckoning would not begin until Americans became ready to confront hard questions about the competence, character, and motives of the Bush administration.

As Clinton’s presidential legacy came under withering criticism from the right, those responsible for preserving and defending his place in history felt the pressure to respond—and to do so in a way that was literally concrete. There was yet no end in sight to fundraising for the Clinton Presidential Center (whose estimated cost was nearing $200 million), but the architectural and landscaping plans were complete and the foundation had enough money banked to start construction. Unless building commenced soon, there would be little hope of opening as scheduled in 2004.

By late 2001, in fact, the project already was almost a year behind schedule. The foundation had hoped to break ground on the twenty-eight-acre site along the Arkansas River, just a few blocks east of the city’s revitalized downtown River Market district, in December 2000. The most durable obstacle was a long-running lawsuit against the project, filed by a local landowner named Eugene Pfeifer III. According to Pfeifer, who had commenced legal action against the city of Little Rock not long after Clinton selected the riverfront site in 1997, the use of eminent domain to obtain his two-acres-plus parcel was unlawful—even though the city had offered compensation of $400,000, a price he agreed was fair.

Pfeifer believed that the use of bonding authority to pay for the land, with $11.5 million in revenues pledged from the city’s zoo and parks, was both unlawful and unfair. “Why shouldn’t the Clinton Foundation just raise the money and pay for the land?” he had demanded repeatedly, arguing that the presidential center didn’t satisfy the statutory definition of a “park,” invalidating the city’s use of revenue bonds to finance the land acquisition. Rebuffed by judges at every level, he had appealed all the way up to the Arkansas Supreme Court.

A local gadfly whose family had operated businesses in Little Rock for more than a century, Pfeifer was not alone in opposing the library—or at least the expenditure of city funds to purchase the land. Sniping
at the overall project as well as the bonding scheme had been led by the
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
, a staunchly Republican daily newspaper whose editorial-page editor, Paul Greenberg, had long since developed a national profile as the city’s most bitter opponent of all things Clinton. (A single Greenberg line captures the theme of hundreds of his editorials and signed columns: “Before this President’s tenure is mercifully concluded, one suspects that Warren G. Harding is going to start looking like a poor misunderstood saint.”)

But opinion polls indicated that most residents of Little Rock—and most citizens of Arkansas—were still excited by the prospect of a presidential library honoring the state’s most famous son.

Plans for the Clinton Presidential Center would transform the designated area, a “weed-choked, rundown warehouse district,” into a world-class tourist attraction with a large new city park, a restored natural riverfront, a newly refurbished pedestrian bridge across the river to North Little Rock, as well as the University of Arkansas’s new Clinton School of Public Service, located in the old Choctaw Station railway depot next door. The center was expected to attract tens of millions of dollars annually in new construction, discretionary spending, and tax revenues. To the city’s leaders, dedicating a portion of park revenues to debt service seemed a small price for such a massive investment in the city’s future.

On November 1, almost exactly a year after Pfeifer filed his appeal, six justices of the Arkansas Supreme Court unanimously ruled against him and upheld the city’s authority to move forward. (The seventh justice, a distant relative of the former president, abstained.) The court found that Pfeifer had failed to prove his contention that the presidential center would not qualify as a park under state law. “I’m shocked,” he told the Associated Press. “This is truly disappointing news.”

The Supreme Court decision was exhilarating news to Skip Rutherford, the Clinton Foundation president overseeing the project. Within two hours after the court announced its ruling, Rutherford was on the phone with Clinton, selecting a date to break ground. They chose December 5, rushing to avoid the oncoming holiday season and put down a symbolic stake before the New Year. Like so many events across America that autumn, it was a moment shadowed by 9/11, yet a celebration of an ambitious plan that now seemed to be on the brink of fulfillment.

Ambitious may be too modest a term to describe the vision that the Clintons had nurtured during years of development stretching back to 1997 when, as president, Bill had announced that the library would be located in Little Rock. Two years later, following a lengthy selection process that involved both Hillary and Chelsea, he had picked the New York architecture firm led by James Stewart Polshek to design the project’s buildings and park.

The sixty-seven-year-old Polshek was by then one of the most accomplished architects in America, if not the most critically venerated—and he was on the verge of popular acclaim with the opening of the Rose Earth and Space Center, a new planetarium shaped as a giant orb-within-cube, at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. But that hadn’t happened yet and nobody had expected Polshek, lacking the flash of more famous competitors, to win the library commission. Aside from the personal rapport that he developed with the Clintons, however, he possessed qualities that the most flamboyant names seemed to lack: a sophisticated political awareness and a strong social conscience.

The son of a politically progressive businessman from Ohio, Polshek often expressed his conviction that the work of architects needed to be more than clever, original, or visually arresting; he believed firmly that buildings, especially public structures, ought to serve society’s broader goals as well as the needs of a particular client. Self-effacing and even shy when compared with the outsized personalities populating the upper reaches of his profession, Polshek didn’t hesitate to identify himself forthrightly as a liberal Democrat. On one occasion, he even declared that he could never design a library for a Republican president. “Architecture and politics will always be connected,” he later explained in an interview. “I like to think that there’s a certain coherence between one’s idealistic beliefs about the world and the clients one works for.”

The distressed Little Rock site, the library’s dimensions and purposes, the overwhelming need for exhibit and special storage space—not to mention the highly opinionated client himself—presented special challenges to Polshek and his partner, Richard Olcott. Clinton’s library required the largest archival capacity of any of the eleven presidential repositories administered by the National Archives and Records Ad
ministration, to cope with over 80 million pages of documents and two million photographs comprising nearly 36,000 cubic feet of space, along with thousands upon thousands of artifacts, gifts, and curios. (The records of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who served as president for twelve years, took up less than 9,000 cubic feet at Hyde Park in upstate New York.)

Permanently preserving those records and artifacts required careful protection from excessive light and changes in temperature, but Clinton insisted that the library’s interior spaces must be suffused with natural light, potentially ruinous to those objects. He wanted the library building and exhibition space to embrace the Arkansas River flowing by on its northern side, while opening up to Little Rock’s downtown on the west.

Having initially situated the library on an east–west axis that would afford a river view from within its galleries, Olcott and Polshek turned the building 90 degrees so that its entrance faced the river and its long, glass-enclosed sides would admit natural light from east and west—using special glass that blocked the most damaging spectrum. (Most of the papers and artifacts would be stored inside huge basement vaults in an adjacent, climate-controlled archive building.) Visitors would enjoy the riverfront scenery while strolling through the park—landscaped with native trees, plants, and flowers—or over the restored railroad bridge that would bring them across the river from North Little Rock.