Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton (40 page)

And although Hillary would never say so, Bill’s fluency, skill, and even his renewed popularity sometimes created difficulties for her as a fledgling pol on her own. The invidious comparison between her and her husband—a man widely regarded as the most talented politician
of their generation—had become a favored cliché among journalists sometime during her first Senate race. Like many banal observations it was more than a little true, as Hillary never tried to deny.

Early in February 2006, that contrast was highlighted at the funeral of Coretta Scott King, widow of the slain civil rights leader, who had died of ovarian cancer. King’s televised memorial service, held in a suburban megachurch that easily accommodated a spirited throng of more than ten thousand mourners, included remarks by President George W. Bush, former President Carter—and both Clintons, who went up to the altar together.

The standing ovation they received went on for more than a minute, until Bill Clinton repeatedly gestured for quiet, biting his lip and smiling. He had the mourners laughing and applauding from the moment he started speaking. “I thank you for that wonderful reception. You might not feel like repeating it after you hear what I’ve got to say.” He joked about his relationship with Bush 41, whom he gently mocked as an Episcopalian, “one of the frozen chosen.”

Then his tone abruptly changed as he pointed to the casket.

“I don’t want us to forget that there’s a woman in there, not a symbol—not a symbol! A real woman who lived and breathed and got angry and got hurt and had dreams and disappointments.” He spoke of the burdens she had borne every day as the great civil rights leader’s wife, and of how her children must be feeling at that moment, as they prepared to bury their mother. He imagined Coretta King’s conflicting emotions on the day after the assassination in 1968 when, instead of secluding herself, she went directly to Memphis to march with the impoverished sanitation workers in her dead husband’s place.

“Now, that’s the most important thing for us,” said Clinton. “Because what really matters, if you believe all this stuff we’ve been saying, is what are we going to do with the rest of our lives? So her children, they know they’ve got to carry the legacy of their father and their mother now. We all clap for that; they’ve got to go home and live with it. That’s a terrible burden. That is a terrible burden. You should pray for them and support them and help them.”

In rising voice, bolstered by bursts of applause, Clinton built on this theme—the responsibility of all to carry on the work of Martin and Coretta—until he reached an electrifying conclusion: “We can follow
in her steps. We can honor Dr. King’s sacrifice. We can help his children fulfill their legacy. Everybody who believes that the promise of America is for every American, everybody who believes that all people in the world are caught up in what he so eloquently called the inescapable web of mutuality, every one of us in a way, we are all the children of Martin Luther and Coretta Scott King. And I for one am grateful for her life and her friendship.”

Following him, Hillary delivered prepared remarks that, on paper, were touching and uplifting. But her reception didn’t approach the wild clapping, laughter, cheers, tears, and roars of “Amen!” in response to his extemporaneous sermon. The reviews were unsparing: “As Bill riffed, Hillary stood by his side, looking like the gawky sidekick in a teen movie. . . . He stole the show and made his wife look like an ordinary politician.”

Such nagging comparisons could be minimized, if not eliminated, by making sure that husband and wife didn’t appear together in public too often. There were few occasions when a direct contrast would be unavoidable.

The clashes between her political ambitions and his global presence could not be so easily anticipated and deflected. The first came within weeks after the King funeral, in the midst of a furious national debate over the proposed takeover of American shipping facilities by Dubai Ports World, a company controlled by the ruling families of the United Arab Emirates.

The controversy erupted after the Bush administration approved the Dubai firm’s $7 billion purchase of Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation, an old British company that operated ports in New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Miami, and New Orleans. To many in Congress, that approval appeared to have been rushed through, without sufficient attention to dubious connections between the Emirates and al Qaeda as well as the Taliban. In 1999, the presence of Emirati royals at Osama bin Laden’s Afghan hunting camp had thwarted an American air strike against the terrorist sheikh; moreover, two of the 9/11 hijackers had carried Emirati passports, and the conspirators had used safe houses and bank accounts in Dubai. The Islamist nuclear weapons conspiracy overseen by Pakistani physicist A. Q. Khan had also operated behind a fake computer firm in the glittering Gulf city.

Although the UAE government had fully supported American efforts against terrorism following the September 2001 attack—maintaining that support in the years that followed—congressional opponents of the ports deal cited lingering security concerns. Some of those critics also pointed with suspicion to the deep personal and financial connections between members of the Bush family and the Emirates rulers, embarrassing the White House at a moment when President Bush’s approval ratings were already in free fall. Both the president’s father and his brother Neil had benefited from Emirati largesse.

In the midst of this bitter dispute—which pitted a presidential veto threat against a bipartisan legislative majority seeking to kill the deal—the
Financial Times
reported that executives of Dubai Ports World had consulted Bill Clinton about their troubles. On the evening of February 17, the Emirati businessmen had reached Clinton in Goa, India, where he had spent the day visiting the headquarters of Cipla, the big generic drug manufacturer that supplied antiretroviral formulations to CHAI partners in more than thirty countries. (The stop in Goa was part of a longer trip that included the Delhi society wedding of Vikram Chatwal, playboy son of the very wealthy Indian American hotelier Sant Singh Chatwal, a donor and friend.)

Clinton listened as the Dubai Ports executives recounted their troubles in Washington. His response was crisp: Their company should submit to a more thorough federal investigation, and must guarantee that should they eventually prevail politically, they would substantially improve security at all their American ports.

Whatever Hillary Clinton might have felt about her husband’s advice to Dubai Ports, she had already come to a decision about the Emirati firm. While he was in Asia, she announced her plan to introduce a bill that would prohibit any company owned by a foreign government from acquiring American port facilities—on the same day that he spoke with the Emiratis. But that didn’t discourage certain Republicans from fabricating a Clinton conspiracy as a distraction from Bush’s veto threat.

Bill Clinton had received generous speaking fees and million-dollar library donations from the Maktoum family that rules Dubai, and the Nahyan family that rules the capital of Abu Dhabi and controls the national government there. And, one of Ron Burkle’s Yucaipa investment
funds, then partly owned by Clinton, had entered into partnership with a Dubai sovereign wealth fund, although not the same fund that owned Dubai Ports World.

The Persian Gulf monarchs had been generous not to Clinton alone, but to all his recent predecessors. Their millions of petrodollars had underwritten every presidential library, including that of George H. W. Bush. The investment funds and other businesses in the Gulf States had provided lucrative opportunities for various Bush family members, including two of the president’s brothers.

Clinton’s own relationship with the Emirati leaders dated back to his presidency. True to long-standing American policy, he had cultivated the Gulf Arab leaders, whom he viewed as moderate and modernizing forces in the region, despite their autocratic regimes, exploitive labor policies, and adherence to conservative Islam. Since leaving the White House he had maintained ties with all the Gulf States and especially the Emirates, whose comparatively progressive leaders were seeking to develop new projects with Western governments, cultural institutions, and universities.

Yet there was no evidence to support the charge—leveled by a few Republicans on Capitol Hill and the usual right-wing commentators—that the Clintons had covertly advanced the Dubai Ports takeover. “President Clinton now is on record as advising the emir [of Dubai] on how to make this deal go through,” complained right-wing Representative Duncan Hunter of California on ABC News.

Senator Clinton had acted against the interest of the Emirates’ rulers, in fact, despite her husband’s connections with them. And Bill Clinton spoke out publicly in support of her restrictive legislation. “Whether [her bill] passes or not,” said a statement released by his office, “he believes this purchase should not be approved unless the security of our ports can be dramatically improved.”

Still, the Dubai Ports controversy provided an early warning about the problem posed by Clinton’s worldwide network of partnerships with wealthy individuals, major corporations, foreign governments, and their leaders. If his affiliations appeared to compromise Hillary’s role in government, the damage to both of their reputations could be severe. However innocuous the underlying realities might be, appearances mattered more, especially under the scorching spotlight of
national politics. And perhaps because they felt so sure of their own probity and benign purposes, neither Bill nor Hillary Clinton would always be sufficiently sensitive to how things might appear—or might be made to appear.

Much more troubling to Hillary and her closest associates was the constant chatter concerning her husband’s alleged extramarital romances, which buzzed in the background—and was always amplified by speculation about her presidential aspirations. If he appeared anywhere with an attractive and unattached woman, even in a group photo leaving a restaurant, her name would be “linked” to him in tabloid columns, as occurred regularly for a while with Belinda Stronach, a divorced Canadian heiress in her forties who held a seat in Parliament. He had likewise been “linked” to another wealthy, younger Canadian woman living in New York, to a divorced blond neighbor in Chappaqua, even to actress Gina Gershon—not much of a real connection was required to stimulate gossip.

Both Clintons resented this whispering as a damnable intrusion on their privacy, but the condition of their marriage wasn’t a topic that could be brushed aside, at least not politically. The scars sustained in the Lewinsky affair had permanently sensitized not just their friends or their enemies, but the entire Democratic Party apparatus to the threat posed by any reprise of that kind of scandal. It was a subject that engaged the prurient, anxious gaze of everyone, from ordinary voters to congressional leaders.

It was also a matter that drew the attention of the editors of the
New York Times
, who assigned reporter Patrick Healy to conduct an exhaustive inquisition into the Clintons’ marriage and its potential impact on her political career during the spring of 2006. After much internal debate among aides to both husband and wife over whether to cooperate with Healy, they sent forth press secretaries Jay Carson, representing Bill, and Philippe Reines, representing Hillary, to deal with his questions. In the meantime, Healy had reached out to fifty Clinton friends, acquaintances, and former aides.

On May 23, the story appeared above the fold on the paper’s front page, under the headline “For Clintons, Delicate Dance of Married and Public Lives.”
Aside from a suggestive mention of Stronach—who had been glimpsed emerging from a Manhattan steak restaurant with Bill Clinton and about ten other people—the article chronicled, somewhat poignantly, the difficulties of maintaining contact when both partners are exceptionally busy and often traveling.

“Mr. Clinton is rarely without company in public, yet the company he keeps rarely includes his wife. Nights out find him zipping around Los Angeles with his bachelor buddy, Ronald W. Burkle, or hitting parties and fund-raisers in Manhattan; she is yoked to work in Washington or New York—her Senate career and political ambitions consuming her time,” Healy wrote.

While his article carped about a lack of cooperation from Reines and Carson, they had provided him with complete data from their schedules, showing exactly when they had been together since the beginning of 2005. On average, they had spent fourteen days per month in each other’s company—a figure that, as Healy would later acknowledge, was “about average” for political spouses. They had constructed largely separate lives, as Healy noted, partly out of necessity and partly to keep Bill from overshadowing Hillary.

Refusing Healy’s request to interview his subjects, Carson and Reines instead had given the
Times
a brief statement about their marital relationship:

She is an active senator who, like most members of Congress, has to be in Washington for part of most weeks. He is a former president running a multimillion-dollar global foundation. But their home is in New York, and they do everything they can to be together there or at their house in D.C. as often as possible—often going to great lengths to do so. When their work schedules require that they be apart they talk all the time.

The remainder of the
Times
account read like boilerplate, featuring remarks from friends and political observers about how Bill tried to support Hillary politically, how their domestic relationship seemed to have healed, and how misgivings about Bill still made Hillary’s allies wary. But what might have proved disastrous, from a public relations perspective, had turned out to be no worse than annoying.

For a man long acknowledged to be a master of American politics, Bill Clinton’s role in his wife’s Senate career had been humble and unobtrusive. “She knows a lot more than I do about the politics of New York and the decisions she has to make,” he would explain. “Tons more! I am literally ignorant. . . . I’m almost totally worthless to her about either New York politics or the politics of the Senate. I just don’t know enough. And besides, she’s gotten better at this than I am because she’s in it all the time.” He smiled. “You get a little rusty. Except I do go to the State Fair with her every year, ’cause I’m real good up there.”