Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton (4 page)

“These bookings are just going away,” the gentle agent had told her sadly. “I’m not sure what to do, not sure what the president will want to do.” He paused. “I know this isn’t going to last. They’re going to come back.”

When Tramontano arrived at the house in Chappaqua, she hung around the kitchen until Clinton came downstairs. They sat down in the living room, making small talk at first. “Mr. President,” she finally said. “I just talked to Don Walker. He had thought most of these speeches would hold, that they would stay with us. But sir, they’re not.”

The next day, news broke of Clinton’s first scheduled speech at a Morgan Stanley bond sales conference in the posh Florida coastal enclave of Boca Raton, with a reported fee of $100,000, scheduled for February 5. That date had not been canceled, and Clinton looked forward to combining a lucrative speech with a short vacation at the Biltmore in Coral Gables, where he could escape New York’s freezing weather, play golf, and rest.

The bond traders and the Boca residents were friendly and welcoming. So were the Florida Democrats with whom he mingled at the Biltmore. The speech went well and his hosts thanked him warmly.

But even before Clinton spoke, the financial firm’s branch switch
boards across the country began lighting up with calls from furious clients, threatening to pull their money out. The protests grew so loud and angry that Morgan Stanley president Philip Purcell felt he had to do something to quell the growing panic in his company.

“I fully understand why you are upset that former President Clinton spoke at one of our conferences,” said Purcell in a message released three days later to all of the firm’s clients and the public. “We clearly made a mistake. . . . We should have thought twice before the speaking invitation was extended. Our failure to do so was particularly unfortunate in light of Mr. Clinton’s actions in leaving the White House.”

By the end of that week, almost every speech scheduled for Clinton in the United States was gone.

CHAPTER TWO

With the nationwide explosion of fury over the Marc Rich pardon, Clinton’s adversaries in politics and the media realized how much they still enjoyed lashing him, regardless of his physical exit from the capital. If anything, the compulsion to pursue their old quarry seemed to be swelling, now that he was no longer the leader of the free world but just another defenseless citizen.

Almost overnight, his poll ratings declined by more than 20 points, with the Gallup poll showing his personal approval dipping below 40 percent—the lowest ebb since he began his national career. Suddenly there was no jeopardy in attacking him, and plenty of opportunities to continue the hunt.

Both Clinton and his staff had yet to comprehend how persistently the enmity toward him still festered, and how their own seemingly innocuous decisions could flare into nasty complications. Choosing an office space might have seemed uncontroversial, for instance, but quickly became the latest public relations debacle. Like the pardons and the gifts, Clinton’s decision to locate on Manhattan’s swanky West 57th Street fed persistent media narratives about his grasping, high-handed, and presumptuous attitude.

Toward the end of January, word had leaked to the
New York Post
and the
Daily News
that the former president was seeking to lease premium luxury office space in Midtown to house his post-presidential operations. Clinton’s post-presidential office, led by Karen Tramontano, was talking with Rockrose, one of the largest real estate firms in the city, about renting an entire floor near the top of Carnegie Tower, a marble-and-glass palace on West 57th Street, with magnificent views northward of Central Park.

That same floor had housed
Talk
magazine—an ill-fated print venture edited by the legendary Tina Brown, British-born queen of media-mad Manhattan, and bankrolled by Miramax Pictures chief
Harvey Weinstein, a longtime Clinton donor and personal friend. Still whirling through the tower’s glass doors and into its supercharged elevators were the likes of entertainment mogul Barry Diller, former Universal Studios president Frank Biondi, directors and producers such as Robert Benton and Stanley Jaffe, America Online chief Bob Pittman, and entertainment lawyer Allen Grubman. Not to mention Jerry Seinfeld, then at the pinnacle of sitcom stardom—“and a huge Clinton fan,” according to his publicist—who was reportedly bidding for offices just one floor below the space coveted by the former president.

Many of the other potentates of 57th Street were huge fans as well, buzzing over Clinton’s anticipated arrival on their rarefied and luxurious turf. It was easy to imagine him ensconced comfortably among them; his attraction to the world of showbiz had always been mutual. Visiting the building a few weeks earlier, on a visit to Manhattan with Hillary, he had said: “I’m kind of tickled. . . . Here I am in New York, where all the writers, artists, and athletes are above average, and everyone gets their vote counted.”

Not everybody would be quite so tickled by the pending Midtown lease as Clinton and his prospective neighbors were, however—or at least not for the same reasons.

The editors of the
New York Post
, flagship tabloid of Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing media empire, knew exactly what to do when they learned that Clinton was seeking to rent big fancy offices in midtown at taxpayers’ expense. While the United States Treasury is required by law to pay for office space for every living former president in the location of his choosing, leasing the fifty-sixth floor of Carnegie Tower would cost no less than $600,000 a year and possibly much more.

On the morning of January 28, the
Post
splashed an embarrassing headline across its front page: “‘CADILLAC’ BILL’S $665G DIGS: OFFICE COSTS MORE THAN OTHER ‘EXES’ COMBINED.” The story inside explained that the rental cost of the Carnegie Tower office space would exceed what the federal government’s real estate arm, the General Services Administration, was paying for the offices of Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George Herbert Walker Bush, which altogether amounted to less than $625,000 a year. Although sources familiar with the lease negotiations between the federal agency and Rockrose whispered that the price was actually “a steal” at $80 per square foot—
when the going rate in that class of Manhattan building ran closer to $100—that argument sank beneath a torrent of outrage.

At first, the chairman of the House appropriations subcommittee that oversees funding for former presidents—a hard-core ultraconservative Republican representative from Oklahoma named Ernest Istook—responded rather mildly to the
Post
exposé. “If the [former] president chooses to have his office in his newfound state rather than his home of 50 years, that is his prerogative,” said Istook. “But obviously, it’s going to cost the taxpayers a lot more money.” Taxpayer and public interest groups across the ideological spectrum swiftly condemned the proposed lease as an unjustified extravagance, demonstrating how little residual goodwill toward Clinton remained.

The “Cadillac” headline quoted a quip from the president of the National Taxpayers Union. Expanding on the same theme, Thomas Schatz, president of the conservative Citizens Against Government Waste, said: “The Clintons have always treated public money with a sense of entitlement, but this takes the cake. . . . Once again, Mr. Clinton has displayed his narcissism, his spendthrift habits, and willingness to squeeze the maximum benefit out of every loophole.”

Then Charles Lewis, executive director of the liberal Center for Public Integrity, chimed in with a reminder of Clinton’s waning popularity. “After his pardons and his gifts,” said Lewis, “I think we should give him a pup tent in Central Park.” A spokesman for the Congressional Accountability Project, founded by consumer advocate and 2000 presidential protest candidate Ralph Nader, eagerly joined the chorus of disapproval: “There’s no question that it’s arrogant, it’s a slap at the taxpayers. It shows tremendous disrespect for the taxpayers.”

In Clinton’s adopted hometown, the Carnegie Tower story provoked snark and snobbish gossip, if not so much fiscal indignation. As a Manhattan real estate broker told the
New York Observer
: “That building fits him like a glove. It’s a building for currently successful scoundrels. You have to have the money, but it’s not really high class.”

Emboldened by this broad upwelling of public anger, Istook announced that he would oppose the Carnegie Tower lease and sent a letter to GSA officials warning that they would be “extremely unwise” to proceed. “Congress appropriated every penny that former President Clinton asked for his transitional expense, and in specific, the rental
expense at a rate equivalent to $228,000 for his office space,” he wrote. “Unfortunately, we’re being told now that the former president wants to spend about three times as much as he asked for and as we budgeted and appropriated for the purpose.”

The weakness of Clinton’s position could be gauged by the response of Jake Siewert, the last of his presidential press secretaries, who had stepped temporarily into the breach at Band’s request to mount a defense.

“This president should not have to pay some penalty because he chose to live in New York. Every New Yorker knows it’s expensive to live here, but it’s worth it,” he said. “We’ll work with the money that government appropriates for us.”

Affable but sharp, even Siewert—who privately bemoaned the handling of Clinton’s early post-presidency—didn’t find Carnegie Tower easy to justify. By that point neither did Karen Tramontano, whose efforts to secure the luxury space seemed to be doing her boss far more harm than good. Seeing pictures of the dark glass skyscraper in the press and on television, over and over again, had begun to make her feel physically ill.

Acting to put the gifts controversy behind them, the Clintons decided to personally pay for the furniture and other presents, mostly from personal friends, that they had taken with them from the White House. Contrary to the screaming headlines, tut-tutting editorials, and lacerating columns, the fact was that nearly all of the gifts had been donated during the course of Clinton’s eight years in office, rather than during 2000. Most of the financial value of the gifts was accounted for by two Dale Chihuly glass sculptures—one donated by the acclaimed artist himself, another given by the president’s Georgetown classmates. In short, there was no substantive ethical issue, just a poisonous cloud of misinterpretation.

Nevertheless, Hillary Clinton’s new Senate press secretary, James Kennedy, told reporters that they would write checks totaling roughly $86,000 to Steven Spielberg, Ted Danson, and Mary Steenburgen, and about two dozen other friends who had given fine china, flatware, and other furnishings (including the table and chairs from Denise Rich).
They would still keep other presents received before 2000, valued at over $100,000—noting in a statement that, like other presidential families, they had “received gifts over the course of our eight years in the White House and followed all the gift rules.”

At least one of the gift-givers was disappointed to learn that he would receive a check from the Clintons. Said Paul Goldenberg, owner of Paul’s TV, a big discount electronics retailer in Los Angeles, “I think it’s too bad. I feel they’ve done a good job for the country, and I was more than happy to give them something for their new home.” When a reporter asked what he had hoped to get in return—what was his “agenda”?—Goldenberg replied tartly: “How could there be an agenda? I’m just a guy who owns a television store.”

To Clinton critics in Washington, however, this latest gesture only confirmed the couple’s essential guilt. Why would they pay up if they did nothing wrong? Indeed, every attempt to put the bad press to rest looked more and more futile, with still worse stories looming.

On Capitol Hill, both the Senate Judiciary Committee and the House Government Reform Committee had announced public hearings on the pardons, focusing on Rich, to be held back-to-back on February 7 and February 8. The subpoenas that began to arrive at the William J. Clinton Foundation office were passed on to David Kendall, the Williams & Connolly partner who had served as personal counsel to both Clintons for almost two decades.

With the tide of public opinion running so powerfully against him, and with so few resources at his disposal, the best defense that Clinton still had resided in Kendall—a loyal, dependable, and exceptionally capable attorney who had shouldered the legal weight of every Clinton scandal, real or phony, from the beginning. An Indiana native, calm but tough, Kendall was a veteran of the civil rights movement—he had been arrested several times in Mississippi during the 1964 “Freedom Summer” campaign to register black voters—and met Clinton at Oxford in 1968 when both were Rhodes Scholars. Like the Clintons, Kendall had later graduated from Yale Law School. When the Whitewater controversy first erupted in 1993, they had turned to him.

Over the years, Kendall’s wide-ranging career had included libel defense work on behalf of the
National Enquirer
. The tabloid’s editor Steve Coz once said that profiles of the smooth, immaculately attired
lawyer always portrayed him as “a Quaker choir boy,” but “in reality he is a street fighter, a polished version of James Carville.”

Anticipating a circus on Capitol Hill, Kendall briefly attempted to resist a subpoena from the House committee demanding the name of every foundation donor. A grandstanding Senator Arlen Specter, chair of the Senate committee (and at that time still a Republican), told the
New York Post
that he might subpoena Clinton himself to testify—an unprecedented indignity for a former president. (President Gerald Ford had testified about his pardon of Richard Nixon in 1974 but appeared voluntarily.)

In the end, Burton issued no subpoena to Clinton. Although he never testified before Burton’s committee, the former president promised to cooperate fully with the investigation—and ultimately he did, waiving all executive privilege claims and allowing three of his top aides to testify at length about their private conversations with him concerning the pardons of Rich and Green.