Bill Clinton’s eight years in office have been a rollercoaster ride of scandal and comeback, disaster and triumph. Jonathan Freedland, who spent much of that time following the president, salutes a political genius with the common touch
America has begun to say farewell. It will be a long goodbye, one that fits the outsized character of the man. For the United States has three months to let go of a leader who has, by turns, enthralled, appalled and seduced them for eight compelling years. Bill Clinton won’t officially become the ex-president till a minute past noon on January 20 2001, but already he is yesterday’s man. In a heartbeat, Clinton has slipped from emblem of America’s present to holdover from America’s past. His fellow Americans will miss him – more, perhaps, than they realise. They’ll miss the two terms of peace and record prosperity, of course, but they might even miss the psychodrama: an eight-year rollercoaster ride so turbulent that those who followed it become queasy at the recollection. They’ll miss the daily triumphs and disasters of a character of Shakespearean complexity, a president who stirred in the American people passions of love and hatred unseen since the days of John F Kennedy and Richard Nixon – and almost never aroused by a single man. Above all, they will miss his signature feature, one which may well have redefined the presidency itself: an almost eerie gift for empathy.
I will miss him, too. For the years of Clinton’s American journey matched my own. I first came to live and work in the country in 1992, just as he exploded on to the national scene. I watched him run for president and stayed to see him do the job. From then on, and for several years, I either watched, read or wrote about Clinton nearly every day. Just as future TV documentary makers keen to evoke the 1990s will flash up an image of the president, I suspect that, when I look back on my late 20s or early 30s, I will do the same. And now that era has come to a close.
The memories come so fast it’s not easy to separate them. That 1992 election alone was so chock-full of scandal and turnarounds, such a vintage campaign, that it’s hard to forget any of it – whether it was Gennifer with a G, the Vietnam draft-dodging letter, written by Clinton while a student at Oxford, or Hillary on 60 Minutes insisting she had been no Tammy Wynette standing by her man and that if you didn’t like her husband, then, “Heck, don’t vote for him”. It was a crazy year, but it was that Clinton gift for empathy which saw him through. I had heard about it before – Republicans had already ridiculed the Arkansas governor’s tendency to begin sentences with “I feel” rather than “I think”, a habit that reached its apotheosis in the legen-dary “I feel your pain”. But there was no substitute for seeing it in action.
Of course, there were the moments widely witnessed, such as those few seconds during one of the televised debates, when the candidates were asked how the recession had affected them personally. Clinton turned the query around, asking the questioner how she had suffered. Meanwhile, his opponent, George Bush Snr, was caught on camera checking his watch.
But there were also the tiny episodes, too small to be reported in their own right, which offered a glimpse of Clinton’s sheer talent for people. It’s perhaps hard, after this year’s lacklustre contest, to imagine the excitement Clinton generated that autumn. “The failed governor of a small southern state,” the Republicans had called him. But the voters didn’t see it that way. I remember two moments from a Clinton-Gore bus tour through the American heartland. It was a swing through southern Georgia and the buzz was palpable. People didn’t just attend rallies, they lined the highways in crowds to catch a glimpse of the man who would be president. Some held banners urging the young governor with the gargantuan appetite (he can eat a whole apple in a single bite) to stop and sample the local peaches or peanuts – and he always did.
His aides would get enraged, every stop delaying the tour by a few more crucial minutes. By the end of a campaign day, Clinton would be running four or five hours late, but it didn’t matter. In the town square at Valdosta a crowd that had gathered for a 9pm rally waited till 2am. Under floodlights on that September night, they cheered themselves hoarse.
Earlier that day, we’d been in a small town called Tifton. Clinton had delivered the usual stump speech, his throat sore, when it began to pour with rain. The reporters ran for cover, inside a makeshift press room where there was the usual supply of chicken drumsticks and Diet Coke. Eventually an Israeli journalist tapped me on the shoulder. “Come outside,” he said. “Look at this.”
The candidate was still out there, shaking the hands of fewer than a dozen elderly voters who had stayed out in the rain. He was talking to each one – not just a “Hi, how are you”, but a proper conversation – as the rain streamed down his face and theirs. His aides were urging him to hurry out, desperate to whisk him on to the bus and into a new shirt. This was not a pose to show how much he cared about ordinary people: there was not a single camera to record it. Besides me and the Israeli, no one saw it. But Clinton did it all the same.
Who knows why? Maybe the legend was right: maybe Clinton believed that so long as he met every single voter in America, they would all vote for him. Maybe his childhood (widowed mother, alcoholic stepfather) had left him with a near-addictive need for human contact, affection and adulation. Maybe he just cared.
Either way, it worked and worked. The crowds got bigger, his voice got hoarser and the empathy gift won that election. I returned to London determined to get work in America that would let me see the next chapter of the story: how Clinton the candidate would become Clinton the president.
The transition was not easy. A dozen books have recounted the political errors of those first months. Day one saw a promise to let gays into the military, a move which only confirmed the brass’s worst suspicions about the new, draft-dodging commander-in-chief. Later Hillary Clinton took control of health-care reform – a move that would bring the administration’s greatest defeat. The first lady presented Congress with an almost comically complicated blueprint for a new system: expressed as a diagram, it looked like a circuit-board for the space shuttle. The fact that the plan had been hatched by a task force of wonks meeting with Hillary in secret added to its Soviet-era aura. By 1994 the plan was dead and the Clinton administration badly wounded.
Things were no easier for the president himself. The Washington establishment was not sure what to make of this brash southern newcomer. They were both excited by and disdainful of him. They sniffed at the Arkansans who piled into town, supporting their beloved Razorbacks football team with the uncouth chant “Oooo pig soo-eeee!” For the Washington elite, Clinton and his friends were hicks, plain and simple.
The greybeards also disdained his way of doing business. They heard that the president would have long “bull sessions” more akin to the college seminar room than the Oval Office. They saw the pizza delivery bikes skidding up to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, as the young, novice staff worked through the night. While Bush had been a grown-up, Clinton’s White House seemed to lack adult supervision.
The word of the hour back then was “unpresidential”. The Washington snobs disliked Clinton’s habit of answering reporters’ questions while still out of breath, pale thighs wobbling. They winced when he answered an MTV inquiry about his taste in underwear: “Boxers or briefs?”
What the scolds did not realise was that all this “unpresidential” behaviour was connected to the presi-dent’s greatest strength: his common touch. He was comfortable with people. So when a little girl, invited to the Oval Office to take part in a candle-lighting ceremony to mark the Jewish festival of Chanukah, yelped as her hair caught fire, guess who put out the flames and calmed her nerves? Not an aide, but the prez himself.
Clinton was like that Star Trek character, the empath, who can psychically read the emotions of those before him; he had a mind-reader’s ability to see into the hearts of any individual or group he faced.
I saw the trick at work in Baltimore, when the president was out selling his health- care package. He was addressing an outdoor crowd of thousands of hospital staff. I was standing among a group of nurses, who began chatting and whispering. Their minds were wandering. Somehow, from faraway, Clinton sensed it. He suddenly declared that his plan really mattered, that it would affect all of them, nurses especially – and that they all had to listen up. The women around me hushed.
The gift did not save him from the failure of the health-care programme, a defeat that was endorsed by 1994’s mid-term elections, which the Republicans won by a landslide. Overnight Newt Gingrich became the hottest politician in America, cheerily explaining that he would be prime minister to Clinton’s now largely cere-monial president. Soon Clinton was forced to tell a press conference why he and his office were still “relevant”.
But the mood changed. On April 19 1995 a right-wing extremist detonated a bomb at a government building in Oklahoma City, leaving 168 dead. Suddenly the anti- government bile of Gingrich’s revolutionaries left a much harsher taste in the mouth: America had seen where such talk could lead.
Clinton stepped forward as the calmer voice, leading the Oklahoma families in mourning. Perhaps for the first time, he looked presidential – a father of the nation at a moment of crisis. Just then, America needed a leader who would feel their pain.
In fact, though no official would ever say it out loud, mourning worked well for Clinton: he gave good funeral. He knew how to touch the right nerve.
I remember a ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery, dedicating a memorial to those who had died in the Lockerbie bombing. He spoke well, as always, but it was afterwards that he came into his own. A huddle of relatives gathered around him. He spoke to each of them, but then he extended his big hands to reach the ones who had not pressed forward, the ones too shy to approach the president themselves. He encouraged them and beckoned them closer, his eyes finding the hesitant widow or retiring father who was holding back. Again, I looked around: no cameras. The TV crews had already got their pictures; Clinton was not doing it for appearances’ sake. He stayed there a full hour over schedule, maddening his handlers and listening to the stories of bereaved loved ones – and not a word was ever written about it.
This talent or knack or psychosis – whatever it was, it secured Clinton’s position as president. Groups who had once been suspicious began to like and eventually adore him.
Take black Americans. In 1992 they had big doubts about Clinton. He was a white politician from the deep South, a Democrat who had signalled his “centrist” credentials by attacking black rapper Sister Souljah and by breaking off from the campaign to return to his home state – to order the execution of a retarded black man convicted of murder.
Yet within a few years Clinton would be hailed by Toni Morrison, the African- American Nobel laureate, as “our first black president” and by the rapper Ice-T as “a brother”. What had changed? Clinton had saved affirmative action from the Republican axe, but he’d also signed a welfare reform bill which hit black families hard. No, it wasn’t policy which sealed the bond between Clinton and black America. It was a more subtle connection. The president displayed a comfort with black audiences that was unheard of among white politicians. He could deliver an impromptu speech-cum-sermon from the pulpit of a black church that had civil rights activists admitting they had heard nothing so inspiring since the days of Martin Luther King. The result is a white president who enjoys 95% approval ratings among African-Americans to this very day.
Jewish voters tell a similar story. They were wary of a Southern Baptist Democrat in 1992: they feared he might be another Jimmy Carter, too sympathetic to the Palestinians. But Clinton reassured them, using his secret weapon: emotional intelligence. It was his instinct and body language that led to that 1993 handshake on the White House lawn between the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s Yasser Arafat and Israel’s Yitzhak Rabin. And when Rabin was assassinated two years later, it was Clinton who knew how to massage Israel’s wounded spirit. He spoke to them, via TV, in their own language, addressing the dead Rabin with the words Shalom chaver (goodbye friend). The phrase had not existed in Hebrew before then; now it’s common Israeli parlance. And so, in 1996, Jewish Americans turned out – alongside blacks and women and Hispanics and trade unions and every other group who felt understood by Clinton – to give him four more years.
I took that as my cue to head back to Britain. I reckoned we’d seen the best of Clinton. The second term would be more of the same, only less so. And for the first year, 1997, I seemed to be vindicated: the economy prospered on auto-pilot and Clinton barely had to break a sweat. But in the first weeks of 1998 the sky fell in. The allegations of a dress-staining affair with a White House intern, Monica Lewinsky, the finger-wagging denial, the talk of perjury and impeachment – it all came so fast. The Washington punditocracy predicted that the Arkansas hick would be sent back to Little Rock by the end of the week. But they forgot who they were dealing with. Clinton was not just the Comeback Kid, the Houdini who had survived a thousand scrapes. He was also the empath-in-chief, and now he got the return on his investment: the American people empathised back.
They had already forgiven or ignored the waves of scandal that had broken with every season of the first term: Whitewater, Travelgate, Filegate and all the other gates never really swung. The American people apparently felt the same way about the president as a former Arkansas state senator I once interviewed. He had worked with the then governor throughout the 1980s and had little sympathy for him politically. But he was adamant: “Bill Clinton doesn’t give duck crap about money.” Americans could see that for themselves: they had a president who had never owned his own house (he had lived in the Arkansas governor’s mansion since he was 32, moving from there directly to the White House). He may have been a shameless hustler after votes, but few voters believed Clinton was ever in the business of lining his own pockets. That’s why all the stuff about Whitewater never stuck.
Zippergate was different: Clinton may not have lusted after cash, but Americans knew he lusted after flesh. They knew, too, that he had an indisciplined, selfish, self- indulgent streak. They knew he could be reckless and self-destructive, taking a risk he must have known could have ended his presidency.
But here’s where empathy became a two-way street. Despite a year-long hammering from the Republicans, and a press united in its disgust for the president’s actions, the public stood by him. Americans told pollsters they hated what he had done but, from the first revelations in January 1998 to the Senate trial a year later, they remained consistent, approving his performance as president and insisting that he should not be removed from office.
They understood him, just as he had understood them. He had always seemed to cut them a little slack, and now they returned the compliment. In the autumn of 1998 they watched the tapes of a beleaguered president assaulted by excruciatingly personal questions from Kenneth Starr’s prose-cutors – grainy footage with the visual grammar of a hostage video – and they sided with him. Just like Hillary, they stood by their man.
Once, when speaking about his faith, Clinton described the God he believed in as “the God of second chances” – and he let out a little smile. That was the Clinton of early 1999: a lucky man, blessed with forgiveness.
In the end, he was less Houdini than Rasputin. The Republicans tried and tried to kill him, but they failed, destroying themselves in the attempt. Where are his enemies now? Gingrich was forced out of the speaker’s chair after the impeachment debacle, so was his successor. The rest of the president’s persecutors in the House are in tight congressional races today, desperate just to hold on to their seats.
And as for Clinton, he is no longer in total command. I can look back now on the last eight years and admit that those of us who covered him were spoiled. We saw a president with towering politi-cal skills and a serious intellect – a man who could rattle off the fine-print detail of any policy programme anywhere in America and discuss the domestic politics of most countries in the world, a leader who would think nothing of calling up the great academics and writers of the day, often in the small hours, for a late-night, unarranged t^te-…-t^te.
And there was that gift for people. I admit it, it spoiled me – it even skewed my judgement. I came back from America to cover Britain’s 1997 election, and was soon whispering to friends my anxiety that Tony Blair’s success was far from assured: he got such little enthusiasm from the crowds. I’d got used to winning candidates getting a Clinton-sized response. Now I can see that I had witnessed a once-in-a- lifetime phenomenon. Like someone who heard Sinatra sing in the 1950s or watched John McEnroe play tennis in the 1980s, I had seen a maestro at the height of his powers. Clinton was the Pel’ of politics, and we might wait half a century to see his like again.