Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton (32 page)

Dozens of foreign ambassadors, many former prime ministers and presidents, including Canada’s Chrétien, Norway’s Brundtland, and Israel’s Peres, made the difficult journey to Little Rock from locations as distant as Beirut and Beijing. A planeload of former staffers and supporters had arrived from Washington, while loyal Hollywood friends like Barbra Streisand, Robin Williams, and Kevin Spacey had flown in from the West Coast. John Kerry showed up in one of his first public appearances since the election, evoking spontaneous cheers when the crowd recognized him. So did Al and Tipper Gore.

Clinton tried resolutely to maintain a cheerful affect, but he couldn’t quite conceal how much the weather saddened and frustrated him. He looked better than he had during the campaign but with a lingering pallor. The long hours of a week’s celebration had fatigued him.

Still, the overflowing crowd that had come to celebrate this monument to his presidency buoyed him. So did the two-hour ceremony, which included African drummers, Latin American singers, a choir from the local black college, and his pals Bono and The Edge, rocking out under the falling sky. Ordinary Americans were brought onstage to talk about the changes wrought in their own lives by his administration—a woman who left welfare for work, a student who served as an AmeriCorps volunteer, an older man who got precious time with his dying daughter thanks to the Family and Medical Leave Act. On his book tour, Clinton had encountered dozens of people with similar personal stories—the character witnesses for him and his presidency.

Years later, he would remember those little testimonials, which left
as vivid an impression on him as the gracious and amusing remarks offered by his White House predecessors. Rarely seen together on one stage, his fellow members of the presidential club delivered the kind of tribute that the first president to be impeached in more than a century could scarcely have imagined. (Only Gerald Ford, who had suffered two strokes and almost never appeared in public, at age ninety-one, was absent.)

Jimmy Carter’s Sunday-school demeanor and dour reputation tended to overshadow his dry humor. But he opened with a funny anecdote about his first meeting with a very young Clinton, whom he claimed to have mistaken at first for a messenger. Since then they hadn’t always gotten along well—the prim Georgian was volubly judgmental during the Lewinsky scandal, and again when the Rich pardon emerged. But on this occasion, he seemed eager to make amends for a fateful incident that had occurred when he was president and Clinton was serving his first term as governor.

“I made some mistakes in 1980 during the Mariel boat lift, and the presence of Cuban refugees in Arkansas may have cost him his reelection,” Carter said. “For that, I apologize. But I and the people of this nation are grateful he overcame that temporary setback and went on to become our president.” Coming from a man he had never much liked but nevertheless admired, those words clearly touched Clinton.

The sitting president he had just worked so hard to defeat was equally cordial, alternating between sober observations and laugh lines. George W. Bush declared how pleased he and First Lady Laura Bush were to be present for “this happy and historic occasion,” congratulated Clinton as “Mr. President,” and went on to praise him extravagantly:

“His home state elected him to governor in the 1970s, the 1980s and the 1990s because he was an innovator, a serious student of policy and a man of great compassion.

“In the White House, the whole nation witnessed his brilliance and his mastery of detail, his persuasive power and his persistence.

“The president is not the kind to give up a fight. His staffers were known to say, ‘If Clinton were the
Titanic
, the iceberg would sink.’ ”

Next Bush’s father took the podium, and he didn’t stint on the wisecracks either. Playing on the cliché of “the man from Hope,” George H. W. Bush spoke of how Clinton “went on to touch the lives
of millions around the world as president of the United States, bringing them hope.

“Of course,” he quickly added, “it always has to be said that Bill Clinton was one of the most gifted American political figures in modern times. Trust me, I learned this the hard way.

“And seeing him out on the campaign trail, it was plain to see how he fed off the energy and the hopes and the aspirations of the American people. Simply put, he was a natural, and he made it look too easy”—a pause—“and, oh, how I hated him for that.”

The crowd roared and Clinton chortled as the elder Bush continued in that self-deprecating vein, recalling his ill-fated 1992 encounters with Clinton and a certain third-party candidate.

“You know, to be very frank with you now, I hated debates.

“And when I checked my watch at the Richmond debate, it’s true, I was wondering when the heck Ross Perot would be finished and how I could get out of there.”

When Bush had finished the fraternity-style ribbing, however, the man Clinton had evicted from the White House concluded in a tone of intimacy. Among the “great blessings” of leaving behind the presidency, he confided, “is the way one-time political adversaries have the tendency to become friends, and I feel such is certainly the case between President Clinton and me.

“There’s an inescapable bond that binds together all who have lived in the White House. Though we hail from different backgrounds and ideologies, we are singularly unique, even eternally bound, by our common devotion and service to this wonderful country.” While typically imperfect in diction, the older man’s speech was distinctly warm and, as he and Clinton both would soon learn, prescient.

By the time Clinton rose, he was absorbing energy from the remaining crowd and the presidents who had come to honor him. Peering out into the rows of multicolored umbrellas, his mood seemed to lift, his cheeks flushed, and he smiled. “I can’t see through all the umbrellas and all the ponchos, or whatever you call those classy things that make you all look so beautiful,” he said to rueful laughter. Mindful of the downpour, which had not let up, he spoke for only twenty minutes—for him, a very brief address on a momentous day.

He thanked everyone from his late mother to his wife and daugh
ter, the workers who had built the library, the architects James Stewart Polshek and Richard Olcott, the exhibit designer Ralph Appelbaum, and the builder Bill Clark, another old Arkansas friend. He returned the accolades of those who had spoken before him, with a special word for Carter.

“John Quincy Adams once said, ‘There is nothing in life so pathetic as a former president.’ Well, he turned out to be wrong because of his own service, and President Carter has proved that nothing could be further from the truth.”

Describing the library and its purpose, he returned to the themes of his presidency, focusing on the “bridge to the 21st century” that the building’s shape and location were meant to symbolize. He spoke of how he had tried to combine progressive and conservative impulses in American politics—of trying to reduce both the deficit and poverty, of economic investment and government reform—and of specific achievements like the Family Leave Act, welfare-to-work, the peace agreements in Northern Ireland and the Balkans.

“That whole story is here in 80 million documents, 21 million emails—two of them mine,” his electronic ineptitude provoking laughter, “two million photographs and 80,000 artifacts”—including complete life-sized replicas of his Oval Office and Cabinet Room, re-created by the Clintons’ favorite interior designer, Kaki Hockersmith; the bulletproof presidential limousine that drove him to his inauguration in January 1993; and hundreds of gifts from citizens, schoolchildren, and foreign dignitaries, all on view in the library’s exhibit spaces. (Thousands more were stored below ground, kept safe in the climate-controlled, highly secure archives structure that Polshek hid behind the main building’s southeast corner.)

“Quite apart from all the details,” said Clinton, “the thing I want most is for people to come to this library, whether they’re Republicans or Democrats, liberals or conservatives, to see that public service is noble and important; that the choices and decisions leaders make affect the lives of millions of Americans and people all across the world.”

After more than two hours, the ceremony finally concluded and the damp presidential party went into the library building, where a mildly dazed Clinton led them all on a quick tour before lunch. Polshek, Ol
cott, and Appelbaum were stationed inside to answer questions about design and construction.

White House political boss Karl Rove, a history buff if not a Clinton admirer, had joined President Bush on the trip to Little Rock. Ambling in ahead of the presidents, Rove introduced himself to Polshek. Pointing to the double-layered glass skin that suffused the spacious interior with light, the White House political chief wanted to know whether a bullet or a bomb could pierce it. “And . . . how much did this place cost, anyway?” he demanded, with a belligerent cackle. A lifelong liberal Democrat, Polshek smiled and answered politely.

In a white tent next to the building, the presidents, their families, and some of the honored guests dined on barbecue. Clinton then brought many of them upstairs to show the private apartment constructed for him and Hillary atop the building, surrounded by an ecologically advanced “green roof” (a space from which he intended to shank golf balls into the Arkansas River).

“Yes, this library is the symbol of a bridge, a bridge to the 21st century,” Clinton had confided during his speech. “It’s been called one of the great achievements of the new age—and a British magazine said it looked like a glorified house trailer.”

Clinton would only repeat that snooty insult to the library’s design—echoing local taunts that the 420-foot, rectangular glass-and-metal box resembled a “giant double-wide”—because he felt so confident of its status as outstanding architecture and urban development. Intimately involved with both the internal and external design at every step, he and the architects he selected were fully vindicated by the public and professional response. While the tone ranged from respectful to rapturous, the Clinton Presidential Center was judged a success—and, purely as art, surpassed the other ten presidential libraries in the nation’s portfolio.

A few of the critics who toured the center expressed reservations, even a tinge of letdown, as if they had somehow expected a more edgy, flashy, charismatic design to reflect Clinton’s compelling personality—particularly because, as the reviews knowingly mentioned, the
former president had played a central role in overseeing and guiding the project.

Among them was Nicolai Ouroussoff of the
New York Times
. He praised the way in which the main building’s “sleek cantilevered form thrusts out aggressively toward the river,” ranking it “at the top of a long list of presidential libraries,” above the John F. Kennedy Library on the Boston waterfront designed by Polshek’s mentor I. M. Pei. Yet he found its style to be disappointingly “predictable” even if “dignified” and “solid.”

Other reviewers were far less restrained, even effusive. Blair Kamin of the
Chicago Tribune
too ranked the Clinton library above the JFK, but went further: “Critics who once carped that the museum resembled a trailer on stilts should now be in full retreat,” he wrote, describing the building as “architecturally refined” and “imbued with the dynamism of contemporary life.” The interior “dazzles with its fine proportions, warm materials, and animating natural light.” It is, he concluded, “a major design success”—a place where “monumental modernism is liberating, not oppressive. The monument to the ruler also benefits the people.”

The
Washington Post
critic Benjamin Forgey detected “a certain magic in the transformation” of the derelict warehouse site, “a model of environmental responsiveness,” elevated by architecture that “greatly enlivens its surroundings. . . . This is the way it is supposed to be, but usually isn’t, in complex, prestigious projects such as this. Bravo to all involved.”

Unsurprisingly, journalists who toured the exhibits that depicted Clinton’s presidency found them lacking in objectivity, marred by insufficient emphasis on Monica Lewinsky and impeachment as well as an oversupply of historically biased, gauzily hagiographic spin. Scrutinizing the multimedia presentation in the library’s main hall,
New York Times
critic at large Edward Rothstein complained, “Every object, every piece of text, every sound is harnessed in service to an almost relentless message about Mr. Clinton’s achievements. . . . Perspectives of serious critics are nonexistent . . . the exhibits paint with such a broad brush and use such a limited palette.”

Yet however justified—and certainly the exhibits reflected Clinton’s viewpoint above all—the objections of critics like Rothstein mattered
little to the public. Over the following year, tourists swarmed into the Clinton Presidential Center, in numbers rivaled only by the Reagan library in Simi Valley, California. Nearly 300,000 visitors showed up in 2006—and the city of Little Rock estimated total local investment stimulated by the project had by then reached nearly $2 billion.

Just before dawn on the day after Christmas, one of the strongest and longest earthquakes in recorded history erupted undersea off the coast of the western Indonesian island of Sumatra. Measured by the U.S. Geological Survey’s seismometers at 9.1 or higher on the Richter scale, the tectonic disturbance launched a series of tidal waves, or tsunami, toward the shores of islands and coastal regions in South Asia. There was no tsunami warning system in the Indian Ocean and the huge waves came ashore with smashing force.

Within minutes, a wave more than thirty feet high hit the northern coast of Indonesia, destroying shoreline villages and towns instantly. More than 130,000 lives were lost there, more than half a million people were left homeless, and nearly two thirds of all the buildings in the coastal region of Banda Aceh were left in rubble. Within the first hour, waves hit Myanmar and the Andaman Islands, leaving thousands more dead; then Thailand, where thousands more were killed, including tourists in Phuket who drowned in their hotel rooms, then Sri Lanka, and southern India, where another forty thousand or more died as fishing villages on the Bay of Bengal disappeared under the onrushing ocean.