Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton (21 page)

So when Blair asked him in March 2003 to promote a second Security Council resolution, in the hope of providing Blix enough time to complete the inspections and avoid war, he overlooked the inherent risks to his own reputation if his secret diplomacy were to be exposed. Clinton agreed with the prime minister’s assessment of the political balance on the Security Council: the West African Francophone countries—Guinea and Cameroon—were most likely to support France’s position against a second resolution, as were permanent members Germany, Russia, and China.

Blair couldn’t depend on support for any resolution backed by the United States and the United Kingdom from any other members except Spain and Bulgaria. Passage required nine votes out of fifteen, so they
would need to line up Pakistan, Syria, Angola, Chile, and Mexico—a very challenging roster, although they hoped to argue that extended inspections represented the best means to avoid war.

In Clinton’s estimation, enough other countries just might support the second resolution if Chile and Mexico did—and he happened to enjoy good relationships with Ricardo Lagos of Chile and Vicente Fox of Mexico. A modernizing socialist president, Lagos had established a friendship with Clinton, whom he regarded as a fellow man of the left. Clinton’s rapport with President Fox, a wealthy conservative, was more complicated politically but nevertheless warm. He would find discreet ways to approach both men, he assured Blair.

Three days after returning from England, Clinton was scheduled to address the annual convention of the Communications Workers of America in Washington. In tone and substance, his speech indicated a shift in attitude toward Bush’s drive toward invasion.

“I’m not so sure we can’t still avoid war and disarm Saddam Hussein, but we’ve all got to be together. We can’t waive the option of using force, but we ought to do this in a way that brings the world together, not divides it,” Clinton told the labor leaders gathered at the capital’s Convention Center, scarcely more than a mile from the White House.

Clinton was careful to take Bush at his word about seeking U.N. approval. “It’s obvious to me that the administration really does want the U.N. to support them,” he said. “The question is, do they want the support bad enough to let Mr. Blix finish his work?” Even as the Bush administration was routinely disparaging Blix as an incompetent dupe of the Iraqis, Clinton praised the chief weapons inspector, urging for the first time that Blix alone should declare a final deadline for Iraq’s disarmament.

“What I think you should be for, as Americans,” he said, “is getting the U.N. to adopt a resolution that is not political on either side—that just asks Hans Blix, an honest, competent man, ‘How long it will take you to verify that Iraq has or has not done these five things that are in Prime Minister Blair’s resolution?’ Then I would hope the United States would agree to that length of time, whatever it is.”

Privately, Clinton arranged a discreet contact with Chilean president Lagos through a back channel arranged by his former White House chief of staff, Thomas “Mack” McLarty, who was acquainted
with the Chilean interior minister, José Miguel Insulza. Not wishing to appear to intervene in matters between heads of state, Clinton asked McLarty to pass a message to Lagos via Insulza. Please call Clinton on the telephone, and inquire how the former president is doing.

A few days later, the call came from La Moneda, the presidential palace in Santiago.

“How are you, Bill?”

Following the ritual pleasantries, Clinton was direct. “Look, Ricardo, I think it might be useful to know that there is one last opportunity for a resolution, it seems”—that is, a last chance to prevent war. Lagos agreed, but in order to publicly join that final effort, the Chilean leader first wanted the support of the Mexicans. Over the following days, Clinton reached out to Fox, whose early days in office had overlapped with the end of Clinton’s second term; their relationship was friendly and candid.

But Fox and other Mexican officials contacted by Clinton told him that they were wary of any resolution that might somehow be interpreted as supporting a war that nearly everyone in their country opposed. If a resolution passed that gave Blix three more weeks, and then he came back and asked for additional time, they asked, wouldn’t Bush invade anyway? By voting for a three-week resolution, the Mexicans feared they would appear to have ratified Bush’s war.

Prodded by his conversation with Clinton, however, Lagos kept working on an alternative resolution with several other countries, if only to buy more time. When the Chilean president announced the text of their proposed alternative on March 13—giving Iraq an additional thirty days to comply with inspections, among other conditions—the U.S. instantly condemned it. Other countries on the Security Council quickly backed away, including the United Kingdom. With Bush pushing back hard, Blair’s final initiative had failed from both directions, and he abandoned it.

Six days later the U.S. invasion began, with unforeseen results that included an estimated cost of three trillion dollars, thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis dead and wounded, and immeasurable damage to the prestige and credibility of the United States—as well as the enhancement of Iranian power in the region, and the eventual emergence of the Islamic State jihadist army.

In keeping with a tradition of alerting former presidents when American military forces engage in action, Bill Clinton learned of the invasion shortly before the rest of the world on March 19. Hillary Clinton, on record in support of Bush’s war resolution, would shoulder a substantial share of blame for its catastrophic consequences. It would not matter that her husband, who urged her to vote for the resolution, had tried to prevent the war.

For Clinton himself, the repercussions of his attempted intervention were never fully clear. Regardless of his efforts to conceal his unorthodox role, there is little doubt that Bush learned about it, possibly in real time. Clinton had traveled to Chequers with his Secret Service detail, and he had engaged in several conversations about Iraq with foreign diplomats on ordinary telephone lines. Those talks had surely been picked up, during those final days and weeks of international negotiation, by the National Security Agency—which was spying intently on the Security Council and its member delegations, especially Mexico and Chile.

Initially reported by the
Guardian
newspaper in early March, the NSA’s U.N. surveillance operation devoted special attention to all six nations—Pakistan, Guinea, Angola, and Cameroon, as well as Chile and Mexico—seen as uncommitted on a final resolution. The wiretaps ranged from the delegations’ embassies in New York City to the homes and offices of a wide range of individuals whose communications might include “anything useful related to Security Council deliberations,” according to a memo circulated by NSA official Frank Koza and leaked to the press by a lower-level employee of Britain’s surveillance agency, the Government Communications Headquarters or GCHQ. Eventually, the NSA surveillance of foreign governments was revealed to extend to the personal telephones of heads of state—including Vicente Fox.

Whatever Bush knew about Clinton’s attempted intervention over Iraq, the former president’s violation of presidential protocol brought no immediate repercussions. Ever since the flap in January 2001 over alleged vandalism by Clinton’s staff in the White House and Air Force One, the relationship between former and current presidents had remained quietly tense.

Rarely did the White House bother to respond to Clinton’s occa
sional public criticisms of presidential policy. The usual voices in the conservative media and a few elected officials, like Senator John McCain, rebuked him. Complaining that “former presidents can do damage,” McCain had at least once urged Clinton to “Shut up!” Soon, however, there would be unmistakable signs of renewed hostility from the Bush administration.

Only days before he left for England, Clinton had taped a short video appearance for CBS’s
60 Minutes
that was intended to mark a new phase of his post-presidential career as a television personality. Despite the controversies that marred his exit from office, or perhaps because of them, many producers wanted his face and his voice on their programs—or wanted him to star in a program of his own—and offered large sums of money to attract his interest.

Doug Band had argued against all of these opportunities as undignified and “un-presidential.” When Don Hewitt, the legendary
60 Minutes
creator and executive producer, asked to see him at the Harlem office in August 2002, Clinton agreed to listen. Hewitt hoped to re-create one of the signature segments that had established the Sunday night broadcast: a highly literate and ideologically impassioned verbal confrontation between liberal Shana Alexander and conservative James J. Kilpatrick called “Point-Counterpoint.”

Although Hewitt had put an end to “Point-Counterpoint” in 1979, its confrontational style, edgy for that era, had been immortalized in a regular
Saturday Night Live
parody by Jane Curtin and Dan Aykroyd that always featured him barking, “Jane, you ignorant slut!” and her snarling response: “Dan, you pompous ass.”

But what Hewitt hoped would stimulate ratings, more than twenty years later, was no such Punch-and-Judy routine. His new idea paired the former president with his 1996 Republican opponent, the retired Senate majority leader Bob Dole, whom Clinton had defeated easily in a campaign that became angry and bitter toward the end. Before Clinton’s second term commenced, however, the two men had begun to reconcile. On the eve of his second inauguration in January 1997, only two months after the election, Clinton had bestowed the Medal of Freedom on Dole in a poignant White House ceremony.

Rather than “Point-Counterpoint,”
Hewitt said the new debates would be called “Clinton-Dole” and “Dole-Clinton” on alternating weeks, with a trial run of ten weeks to the end of the 2003 TV season. For a total of twenty minutes on air, the network would pay Clinton $1 million.

“We can be firm and provocative without being nasty,” promised Dole in a promotional appearance with his former rival on CBS’s
Early Show
. “We’re doing
60 Minutes
because we’re too old for
Survivor
and
Star
Search
,” Clinton joked. The real purpose, he said, was to help people “understand the choices clearly,” or as Dole put it, to make them “stop and think.”

The first segment aired on Sunday, March 9, ten days before the invasion of Iraq, while Clinton was still visiting Chequers. The topic was whether Bush should go to war in Iraq without raising taxes to cover the invasion’s cost, with Clinton arguing the negative and Dole, somewhat out of character, arguing the affirmative. The 150-second debate was neither nasty nor provocative; rather than making people think, the segment made them bored. It was, in the words of one newspaper critic, “must-sleep TV.”

Even Hewitt admitted publicly that the first episode was dull. “We’re going to make sure it looks like more of a confrontation next time,” he told the
New York Post
the next day. But the requisite chemistry was impossible to achieve, in part because, owing to Clinton’s demanding travel schedule, the two stars could never be taped together in the same studio. Although a few of the ensuing episodes were more compelling, “Clinton-Dole” never achieved enough telegenic power to develop any buzz at all, let alone lift the show’s flat ratings. By the end of the season, everyone quietly agreed that this experiment had failed. Cancellation was expected long before CBS announced its fall lineup without the two politicians.

Among the network’s executives there was broad agreement that Clinton had performed well, despite a variety of handicaps that included the choice of topics, the country’s mood in a time of war, and awkwardness of Dole. Other television offers would continue to come his way, with promises of substantial income—and Doug Band would keep pushing back against such proposals as shabby, lowbrow, and very risky for the former president’s stature.

One morning in early August 2001, Ted Widmer picked up the
New York Times
and saw that Bill Clinton had signed a record-breaking book deal with the Knopf division of Random House for his memoirs. An hour or so later, Widmer picked up the ringing telephone in his office at Washington College, the small liberal arts school on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, where he worked as an assistant professor of history. On the line was Doug Band, asking Widmer to come visit Clinton that same day at Whitehaven, Senator Clinton’s residence in Washington.

During the last six months of his presidency, Clinton had given Widmer an important and demanding assignment: to oversee the gathering of documents, data, and oral histories about his eight years in office from every cabinet department. Until then the soft-spoken, unassuming young academic—the only historian in the speechwriting shop—had crafted speeches on diplomatic and security matters from a tiny cubicle in the National Security Council, as one of hundreds of staffers who saw the president from time to time.

For a president concerned with his legacy, the collection of vast troves of words and numbers that would be used someday to describe what he had done—and left undone—was among the most vital tasks of those final months. It required the collection of hundreds of oral histories and millions of pieces of paper—an experience he described as “some fun” but also a bureaucratic “nightmare.” He attended cabinet meetings with the president and dealt directly with top officials in every department.

Widmer’s archival work supplemented the crucial documentation by Janis Kearney, the first presidential “diarist” and an Arkansan whose Clinton ties dated back to the statehouse in Little Rock. From 1995 forward, Kearney had kept a detailed daily account of all Clinton’s meetings, press conferences, and public events to create a “living history” of his presidency that proved invaluable to his memoir research.

Once he got started, Widmer had reported to Clinton personally and regularly on his progress, and they had developed a much closer relationship. Behind his modest demeanor and quick smile was a very sharp, expansive mind with a wealth of historical knowledge. Clinton
and many others in the White House had come to know him well and to appreciate his industriousness, diligence, and sensitivity.