Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton (22 page)

When he arrived at Whitehaven on that August afternoon, Widmer and his old boss went out to the backyard and perched on lawn chairs, as Clinton engaged him in an animated discussion about history, books, and especially books Clinton had loved. How could he write a meaningful work of history about himself? Well before the end of their conversation, when Clinton invited him to come up to New York, Widmer realized that he had been invited to help with the memoir due in early 2004. And when they talked again in Harlem a few weeks later, Widmer realized that Clinton’s expectations for this book were formidable.

“He had this great story to tell, really a classic American story of his rise from nowhere to the pinnacle of political power, the legacy of a generation,” according to Widmer, “and he wanted to write a great book.”

In describing his own ambitions for the book, Clinton had told publisher Sonny Mehta, “I am going to try to write the presidential years, so that people realize how crazy the days are, how everything happens at once, and how it looks when you’re president, and you’re having to deal with all these things at once.” He didn’t believe that any previous president had written a great memoir. Many of them he had found boring. Even the vaunted two-volume
Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant
, which Clinton greatly admired and which Mark Twain himself praised as the best memoir “of any general since Caesar,” fell short in a crucial way.

“I looked at all these other presidential memoirs, and most of them are quite wooden—and the one everybody thinks is the greatest, Grant’s, doesn’t have anything to do with him being president. It’s all about the Civil War and the Mexican War.” Indeed, Grant’s memoir concludes with the surrender of Robert E. Lee at Appomattox.

To tell the complicated story of his presidency, Clinton—although often criticized as perpetually disorganized and unprepared—had spent years in preparation, with the secret assistance of Taylor Branch. The journalist and historian, author of a landmark three-volume biography of Martin Luther King, Jr., and an old friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton dating back to the early 1970s, had met quietly and secretly with the president nearly eighty times in the White House, usually very
late at night, collecting his thoughts and recollections on tape for the historical record. Clinton had contacted Branch, whom he had not seen for twenty years, shortly after winning the 1992 election, and asked him to help preserve the contemporaneous recollections that would be invaluable to historians. As it turned out, those tapes would also form the core of his memoir.

Not many besides Hillary knew what her husband and Branch were up to, because Clinton feared that if news of their midnight taping sessions leaked, either Kenneth Starr’s Whitewater prosecutors or a congressional investigating committee, or both, would instantly issue subpoenas. They had successfully avoided any such inconvenience by maintaining tight confidentiality for more than eight years.

The assistance that Clinton wanted from Widmer was much more confessional than literary. He took pride in his own writing skill and didn’t need a ghostwriter. Unlike many other subjects of autobiography, he would write every word of his own. But he needed someone to help evoke and explore his memories—just as Branch had done, from the very first day of his first term to the very last day of his second.

No secrecy or drama attended Clinton’s meetings with Widmer. He started to come up to Harlem and then to Chappaqua during the fall, bringing a notepad filled with questions and two microcassette recorders as a fail-safe. He knew that Clinton planned to rely heavily on the Kearney diaries and on transcripts of the Branch recordings to stimulate and inform the later chapters about his presidency, and expected that their sessions would develop the same kind of raw material for the earlier chapters leading up to the 1992 campaign.

During the weeks between their meetings, the young historian would return to Washington College, where he continued to teach while conducting background research—on Arkansas politics, on Hot Springs and Hope, where Clinton grew up, on the upheavals of the 1960s, and dozens of other relevant topics. As is so often the case with Clinton, however, the words and memories flowed without excessive prompting. Not only was his capacity to recall events and people stunningly clear and detailed, but he had hoarded boxes upon boxes of personal records for decades.

“Hell, I had a report I did on England in the
fifth grade
! I mean, my mother and I, we saved everything. I had every letter my mother ever
wrote me. And she had every letter I ever wrote her. I had all the letters that my college girlfriend wrote me. I had everything. I just saved everything.”

For several hours, Clinton sat with Widmer in his Harlem office or the big, comfortably furnished living room of the Chappaqua residence. Their intense conversations, he said, “got me to just talk about all of it and it was extremely helpful because, first of all, it got me to thinking about it again.”

Just talking helped him to pinpoint important things that he might not otherwise have remembered—and to conjure another era, fifty years gone, when American life and politics were utterly different. At times, talking about his late mother, his grandfather, and other deceased relatives and friends, Clinton became quite emotional.

Transported by his voice, Widmer felt that the former president “was very, very open . . . completely, sometimes painfully honest . . . and held nothing back. It was
gold
. Sometimes we laughed so hard we cried. He told me hard-hitting stories about being a very poor kid. It was a classic Horatio Alger story—no father, and not the kind of household you’d expect a President of the United States to come from. He talked about the hurt of a child wondering where his mom was, where his dad was. . . .

“It was like traveling back in time to those days when he was growing up in Arkansas, an era when people sat on their porches and talked and talked.”

Most days, when Widmer wasn’t there—and when Clinton wasn’t traveling for paid speeches or foundation work—he would sit down to write. Working from the transcriptions of their talks, which eventually amounted to almost six hundred double-spaced typed pages, he would draft pages in longhand, using spiral notebooks. Most of those days he spent with Justin Cooper, whose role as principal researcher, editorial assistant, and sounding board would prove essential to all Clinton’s books.

Together Clinton and Cooper would sit at a large table in a converted barn behind the Chappaqua house that served as Clinton’s home office, gymnasium, and repository for thousands of books and dozens of souvenirs, paintings, objets d’art, collectibles, and other mementos that were not already on display in his Harlem office. On days when
Clinton traveled—roughly half of any month—Cooper was always with him, and they often worked on the book while airborne.

Every page that Clinton finished, he would turn over to Cooper to type into his laptop, noting facts that required further checking. Later Clinton would review and rewrite, making handwritten revisions on the pages Cooper had typed and retyped, creating second, third, and fourth drafts of nearly every page; some were revised as many as seven times.

With fall turning into winter, and the publisher’s deadline drawing closer, Clinton sent the first 150 pages that he had completed to Robert Gottlieb, the admired former
New Yorker
editor who was handling his book at Knopf. A few days later, Gottlieb called him and said, “This is a hell of a story. How much of this did you make up?”

“It’s all true,” Clinton laughed.

“First of all,” replied Gottlieb, “nobody knows that many crazy people.”

“Yes they do,” said Clinton. “They just don’t pay attention.”

“Secondly, nobody can remember the names of every teacher they had in grade school, and what their junior high school teachers said.”

“Yeah. If you’re paying attention, you can,” Clinton insisted. “That’s what I was raised to do. Keep in mind, I’m the last of the pre-television kids.”

As work on the book progressed, the sessions with Ted Widmer came to an end. There was no more time for lingering hours of conversation, with only months left to finish a draft that would reach 1,500 pages plus. Instead, Clinton spent days and eventually many nights with Cooper, whose typing and retyping of the handwritten pages in more than twenty notebooks kept him on daily duty in Chappaqua for more than a year. Living in Manhattan, he would drive back and forth every day, often well after midnight—until Hillary Clinton found out what was going on and ordered him to stay in the guest bedroom. She hated the idea of his driving back to his apartment in the middle of the night after a grueling day’s toil at the computer.

Like most authors, Clinton felt oppressed by the publisher’s deadline. But he appreciated Bob Gottlieb’s insistence on clarity and precision, and “persnickety” attention to detail. “He wouldn’t miss things, like if I said, ‘There were over 200 people there,’ he’d always mark out and put ‘more than.’ He’d
never let me get away with any little slip like that.”

Even more than that, he valued the editor’s candor: “Gottlieb was most valuable when he’d say this just doesn’t make any sense. You ought to take it out.” At Gottlieb’s urging, Clinton took out thirty pages about his college years at Georgetown that were “just not relevant.” Clinton felt many more pages needed to come out and Gottlieb evidently agreed. But more editing and cutting would require more time.

Over the winter, Clinton proposed a solution. Why not publish the book in two volumes? Then he would have more time to polish the second book about his presidency, while the first book, covering events before 1992, would be published on schedule. But the publishers feared that any such strategy would hurt overall sales. They insisted on maintaining a schedule that would get
My Life
into bookstores by mid-June 2004. With the help of a corps of volunteer fact-checkers, led by chief researcher Meg Thompson and Caitlin Klevorick, Clinton and Cooper pushed through to finish the gigantic manuscript, still adding material and making revisions until the very last possible minute.

While Clinton conspired to influence the U.N. Security Council’s final deliberations over Iraq, Bush was preparing to join the global struggle to contain AIDS. The former president had only begun to assemble the elements of his foundation’s Clinton HIV/AIDS Initiative, led by Ira Magaziner, when the current president announced a major new U.S. government program to fight the epidemic.

In his State of the Union address on January 29, 2003, even while warning the nation that “crucial hours may lie ahead in the Middle East,” Bush reminded Americans that “our calling, as a blessed country, is to make the world better.”

“Today, on the continent of Africa,” he continued, “nearly 30 million people have the AIDS virus, including three million children under the age of 15. There are whole countries in Africa where more than one-third of the adult population carries the infection. More than four million require immediate drug treatment. Yet across that continent,
only 50,000 AIDS victims—only 50,000—are receiving the medicine they need. Because the AIDS diagnosis is considered a death sentence, many do not seek treatment. Almost all who do are turned away.”

But the cost of antiretroviral drugs had dropped drastically, said Bush, “which places a tremendous possibility within our grasp. Ladies and gentlemen, seldom has history offered a greater opportunity to do so much for so many. We have confronted, and will continue to confront, HIV/AIDS in our own country. And to meet a severe and urgent crisis abroad, tonight I propose the Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, a work of mercy beyond all current international efforts to help the people of Africa.”

To finance what would soon become known as the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, Bush proposed to devote $15 billion over the next five years—a tripling of U.S. funding—“to turn the tide against AIDS in the most afflicted nations of Africa and the Caribbean,” by preventing seven million new cases, providing medicine for “at least two million people,” and “humane care for people suffering from AIDS and for children orphaned by AIDS.”

It was a stunning proposal—and a vast increase over Clinton’s own final budget for international AIDS assistance in 2001, which had amounted to roughly $600 million across all federal departments, including the Pentagon.

The boldness of Bush’s new multibillion-dollar plan could be measured by the fact that the United States contribution to global AIDS relief under Clinton, inadequate as it was, represented not only the biggest commitment of any donor but about half of the entire annual financing provided by all the developed countries. The U.S. contribution had been growing, along with contributions from Japan, the European Union, and Scandinavia, but remained far below the estimated $9 billion needed annually to curtail the spread of the disease.

Now Bush was promising a figure that for the first time would—with increased contributions from other governments and private donors such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation—begin to approach the scale of the problem. Moreover, his plan would provide treatment as well as prevention, just as Clinton had demanded in his
New York Times
essay only weeks earlier. It was not merely the most worthwhile program of Bush’s presidency—which might not mean much—but one
of the boldest humanitarian actions any president had undertaken in the modern era.

On many occasions since leaving the White House, Clinton had publicly acknowledged that his administration’s funding for international AIDS programs was far less than needed—while arguing, with equal accuracy, that he had greatly increased funding despite resistance from Republicans in Congress. Many of those same obdurate Republicans, urged on by evangelical Christian leaders, were now supporting the Bush plan.

During the months that led up to the unveiling of PEPFAR (the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief), Clinton had spent hours in unsparing conversation with his daughter about the AIDS crisis, and specifically what his administration had and had not done. Chelsea had chosen to examine the global response to the crisis as the topic of her thesis at Oxford, where she was close to finishing her master’s in international relations.