The Bill Clinton interview

The stars have come out, just as they always did. There’s Uma Thurman, hair beacon-blonde. Glenn Close gives a little wave, taking up her place just a few seats away. Spike Lee is here somewhere. Officially, they’ve all come to the Skirball Centre in New York’s SoHo district for a movie premiere. But the truth is that tonight is only peripherally about a film. The performance this starry, liberal crowd really want to see is by the man who became the most divisive figure in American life since Richard Nixon, the man who was hailed, even by his enemies, as the most gifted politician of the post-war era. They’re here to witness the rebirth of Bill Clinton.

First, comes the movie, The Hunting of the President, a highly partisan documentary which sets out to confirm the truth of Hillary Clinton’s famous declaration that her husband was the victim of a ”vast right-wing conspiracy”. The film recalls it all: the Whitewater land deal; the Arkansas state troopers who claimed to have procured women to feed the then Governor Clinton’s garguantuan sexual appetites; Paula Jones; Monica Lewinsky; and finally Kenneth Starr, the witchfinder-general bent on joining all these dots and turning them into a legal offence grave enough to unseat the president. The audience, Democrats all, hiss the villains and cheer the heroes.

Until the lights come up and there, on stage, is the hero himself. He looks like an ageing nightclub singer, as he saunters to the front of the stage, microphone in hand, hair now soft-white. The room is an ovation, of course, and Clinton basks in it. It’s like the campaign rallies of old which is appropriate because, in a way, that’s exactly what this is.

For Clinton, who has spent all his adult life campaigning, is once again out to sell himself to the American people. This time he is not asking for high office. Instead he seeks vindication, pleading his case in a 957-page autobiography. Starting today, he will embark on a round of TV events and public appearances, criss-crossing the US with the same packed itinerary as a presidential candidate.

Part of it is given over to an exclusive interview with The Guardian, which is also the only British newspaper granted access to the book, published on Tuesday. In a hotel near his home in Chappaqua, New York, he speaks of the scandal that nearly brought him down and how he learned to let go of his rage. He talks about the war in Iraq and his quest for peace in the Middle East. He speaks of his friend, Tony Blair — and the wife who might one day succeed him into the White House.

The Middle East — from triumph to failure

He may no longer be in office, but he still lives on CST — Clinton Standard Time. Aides pop in and out of the anonymous hotel conference room to explain that ”The president is running about half an hour late.” They’re back 20 minutes later to explain that he is now an hour behind schedule. Finally, we are told to ready ourselves an hour and a half after our appointment was due to begin.

He is still preceded by a flurry of activity: his secret service detail acting as the advance guard who enter any room before he does. Like all previous US chief executives he will keep the 24-hour protection — and the title, Mr President — for the rest of his life.

And then he is there, tall, slimmer than he was in office, and with a face craggier than you remember. When he first ran for president in 1992, rivals teased him as a chubby ”Bubba”, a good ol’ boy from the south with a taste for junk food and a waistline to match. He cuts a different figure now: the international statesman in sharp navy suit, salmon-pink tie, Oxford shirt and shoes brought to a military shine.

Nor does he turn on the megawatt smile and charm that used to be a feature of his every campaign appearance. His handshake is not the full body grip so memorably described by Joe Klein in Primary Colors: it is cordial. The eyes seem faraway. Perhaps the great campaigner never turned on the klieg-light charm for mere journalists. Or maybe, now that he is no longer an office-seeking politician, his style has changed.

He brightens though when the initial smalltalk turns to a pastime that is a passion: golf. He has just spent two hours with Klein: the two men are both weekend players, and he reels off details of Klein’s home club. He knows every fairway. Then it’s time for business. ”OK, guys,” he says. ”Shoot.”

We start with the one area that came tantalisingly close to handing him a golden legacy: the Middle East. With trademark Diet Coke in hand, Clinton rattles off the details of the Israel-Palestine conflict as confidently as he did when he was leading the global effort to end it. Percentages of territory, death tolls on both sides — he is a walking database. It’s hardly a surprise. The attempt to make peace between Israelis and Palestinians was one of the constant threads of his presidency, bringing one of its greatest successes — the 1993 handshake between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn — and a lethal failure, the ill-fated peace talks at Camp David in 2000.

My Life is full of fond reminiscences of the early days of that effort: how he advised Arafat not to wear a pistol for that signing ceremony, how he and his aides devised a physical manoeuvre that would prevent the Palestinian leader attempting to kiss Rabin as well as shake his hand.

But he also details the deterioration of the process, giving his account of the Camp David debacle that led to the outbreak of the intifada that still rages. Clinton’s version is that Israel’s Ehud Barak was ready to make enormous concessions but that Arafat was not able to ”make the final jump from revolutionary to statesman … he just couldn’t bring himself to say yes”.

Just before Clinton left office, Arafat thanked him for all his efforts and told the president he was a great man. ”’Mr Chairman,’ I replied, ‘I am not a great man. I am a failure, and you have made me one.”’

We ask whether that leaves Clinton convinced, as the Israelis are, that so long as Arafat is there, there is no Palestinian partner for peace. No, he says, President Bush and Ariel Sharon make a mistake if they think they can ignore the veteran Palestinian leader.

”Unless they just want to wait for him to become incapacitated or pass away or unless they seriously believe they can find a better negotiating partner in Hamas … then they need to keep working to make a deal.”

He adds that the Israeli hope, also backed by Bush, of bypassing Arafat and dealing instead with a new Palestinian prime minister — Abu Mazen in the first instance — was fine in principle but it was ”a step too far to expect a new prime minister, who had no following remotely equal to Arafat’s, to, in effect, take his power away.”

It was no good asking the prime minister to ”publicly neutralise Arafat and render him ceremonial because he still controls too much of the security forces. He won’t let that happen. He’s too smart.”

A power-sharing arrangement with Arafat was the most Bush and Sharon should have aimed for. Sidelining Arafat completely is, even according to a man who has good reason to resent him, not an option.

All this comes in long, detailed answers — often delving into deep history, with a detour on the way — structured into ”three main goals” or ”four reasons”. Suddenly you understand why the Clinton White House — especially in the new president’s first few months — became notorious as a talking shop, with policymaking meetings turning into late-night ”bull” sessions. The habit extended to Clinton’s dealings with world leaders: face-to-face encounters stretching to three or four in the morning. This is a man who can talk.

But at times there are also flashes of what, the previous night, one supporter had called ”a hideous indiscipline”. He was speaking about Clinton’s impromptu post-movie appearance on stage, intended to last no more than 10 or so minutes, but stretching to an often-rambling 35.

There was the same mix of intellectual brilliance — a riff summarising the entire sweep of American political history — and looser passages where he almost seemed to lose the thread. Four years out of office, the former president had seemed a bit like a prize fighter no longer quite at his peak.

But here he is, now, wielding perfect recall and a searching anaylsis. What of Sharon’s plan unilaterally to withdraw from the Gaza Strip? ”If it’s done in the right way, I think it’s a good thing. The idea that Israel as the stronger partner … is strong enough to unilaterally make concessions, I think that is a very good thing – with two provisos. One is I don’t think it should be done in a way that humiliates the Palestinians. If they’re going to do it, they ought to just do it and do it in a dignified manner. Figure out what to do with the settlers and settlements, and if America needs to help financially to relocate them, then we ought to do that, whatever needs to be done.

”The second thing is, it cannot appear that ‘This is the scrap we are throwing you from our table.’ What the message of the Gaza withdrawal needs to be is, ‘Here is a demonstration of our good faith … Now if you will give me security and give up the [Palestinian refugees’] right of return’ — as Arafat’s already said he would do when he accepted my parameters — ‘if you will do these things and work with us in good faith, more will follow.’ Then I think good things will happen.” In other words, Clinton welcomes the Israeli pullout plan if it is Gaza first, rather than Gaza only. He recognises that this might not be how Sharon sees it; the former president admits that the Israeli PM still regards the West Bank as crucial to Israel — a view not shared by Rabin or Barak or, he adds, himself.

Either way, Israel has to act. Clinton explains that continued occupation is a ”loser” for Israel. ”If they don’t let the Palestinians in the occupied territories vote the way they let the Palestinians in pre-67 Israel vote, then they’re an apartheid state. If they do let them vote then they won’t be a Jewish state after a while.” So they have to act. Besides, ”I still think there’s a deal to be had.”

Iraq — low on the danger list

One of My Life’s most arresting passages describes the handover meeting Clinton had with his successor in December 2000. George Bush reckoned the biggest security issues he would face would be national missile defence and Iraq. ”I told him that, based on the last eight years, I thought his biggest security problems, in order, would be Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda; the absence of peace in the Middle East; the standoff between nuclear powers India and Pakistan, and the ties of the Pakistanis to the Taliban and al-Qaeda; North Korea; and then Iraq.”

Besides advertising his own prescience, Clinton seems to be making a point — that Iraq was fairly low, fifth, on the list of priorities, and that, by implication, his successor went on to slay the wrong dragon.

Yet when we ask the former president about Iraq, his answer is not so straightforward. Like the Democrats’ nominee for the White House, John Kerry, Clinton’s position is nuanced. The unkind would say it is confused, or at least political — designed to stay firmly on the fence.

On the one hand, he says, he would have acted like Kerry. ”I would have voted, I confess, if I had been a senator, I would have … voted to give [the president] the authority to attack Iraq because Saddam Hussein in the past had never done anything that he wasn’t forced to do. And we were in this post-9/11 era and I thought it was imperative that we find out whether he had this stuff.”

Clinton knew from his own time in office that there were ”unaccounted-for stocks of chemical and biological agents [in Iraq] which could be weaponised” and that they could fall into the wrong hands.

That much might comfort the pro-war camp. But opponents will also find much to cheer in Clinton’s remarks. The day we meet, initial reports from the independent commission investigating 9/11 conclude that there was no link between Saddam and the attacks on New York and Washington. ”That’s what I always thought,” says Clinton, his gaze firm and steady. ”From the minute it happened, I was virtually positive it was al-Qaeda. I don’t think Iraq had the capability to pull it off.”

Clinton reckons the danger list he had given Bush still remains the most accurate. ”In terms of their own ability to act against us or the Israelis, I always felt that al-Qaeda and bin Laden were a much bigger threat and that the Middle East was a bigger problem, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, because it fed all this other stuff.”

In his view, Iraq was worth inspecting for WMD, but the United Nations was the way to get the job done. ”My view was that we shouldn’t attack until the UN inspectors are finished and they can say, ‘He [Saddam] did or did not comply.”’ For that reason, and to help Blair, Clinton started working the phones, lobbying the leaders of Mexico and Chile to vote for the famous second UN resolution on Iraq — because it would have given Hans Blix and his team a few more weeks and might have got ”America to defer military action”.

Clinton’s wariness of US engagement in Iraq had another source. ”I worried we’d be underdeployed in Afghanistan — and might make the same mistake as we made in the 1980s when the US walked away after the Soviets left.”

But don’t Republicans keep saying that toppling Saddam was Clinton policy too? ”Our policy had been, since 1998, regime change, but our policy toward Castro had been regime change, too, and we hadn’t invaded Cuba! There is more than one way to pursue that objective.”

The special relationship — Blair’s dilemma

The conversation moved naturally to his old friend Blair, for whom he clearly retains a warm regard. He’s at pains to tell ”British readers” how they should understand the nature of Blair’s dilemma.

Nevertheless, asked if the ”special relationship” was strong enough to bear a British prime minister speaking his mind frankly on issues that divided the two countries, he answers with an immediate and unequivocal: ”Yes.”

Clinton said he had much sympathy over the fix Blair was in over Iraq. ”He had a very bad Hobson’s Choice. If he says, ‘Well, the UN didn’t ratify this’ and he walks away, it makes Europe happy but it imperils the transatlantic alliance and it still doesn’t do anything to strengthen the UN. If he stays with President Bush — at a minimum, he’s gonna have to do something about whatever it is there on the WMD side, and he gives himself the chance to be the person who put the transatlantic alliance back together — and he hasn’t hurt the UN any more than it’s going to be hurt anyway.

”I think he thought: ‘In for a dime, in for a dollar. There’s no good answer, this is the less bad alternative.’ I think some of the criticisms he got in Britain didn’t appreciate how hard he had tried to get that other UN resolution through.”

Clinton also defends Blair by highlighting the positions the prime minister had taken against Bush on a number of issues. ”Tony’s been in favour of the comprehensive test ban treaty, he’s for the international criminal court — you know, he didn’t advocate abandoning the ABM treaty. He’s for the Kyoto accord on climate change and has done far more than America has to meet his targets.

”As far as I know Tony Blair’s never embraced the new nuclear policy developed by President Bush — small-scale nuclear weapons and a new one that breaks concrete bunkers. So I don’t think it’s quite fair to see all of his foreign policy through the lens of Iraq.”

Clinton’s admiration for Blair does not exclude his predecessor, especially over Ireland. ”I particularly admired John Major because it was harder for him than it was for Blair because he needed the Unionists in parliament to sustain a narrow majority and yet he consistently tried to do the right thing. So I always thought Major never got enough credit for what he did on Ireland. He had a weaker hand to play than Margaret Thatcher in her heyday and I thought he played it about as well as he could.”

But he does not conceal moments of tension in the relationship — moments where the two fell out publicly without any significant damage to the transatlantic alliance. ”He had to be critical of my visa for Gerry Adams because it put him in a very difficult position. He wasn’t politically able to say anything good about it, even if he thought it had any merit. For days he refused to take my phone calls. The press reported I was mad at him [over allegations that the Major team had helped George Bush’s 1992 campaign, by seeking to dig up dirt on Clinton from British files relating to Clinton’s two-year stint at Oxford.] I was never mad with John Major, though I didn’t mind people thinking I was mad because, you know, it always gives you a little psychological advantage.”

Monica — the couch months

There is a flash of anger only once in our exchange — at the mention of his chief persecutor, Kenneth Starr. It had been the same night before, as he railed against Starr’s pursuit of his friends and former colleagues.

Clinton’s book describes his agony as ”the darkest part of my inner life” was dragged into full public scrutiny — initially as he tried to outwit Rutherford Institute [a right-wing foundation] lawyers acting for Paula Jones as they delved into his personal life. It was these lawyers who first advanced a legal definition of ”sexual relations” which, in Clinton’s mind, ”seemed to require both a specific act and a certain state of mind on my part and did not include any act by another person.” Clinton’s decision to adopt this strict legalistic definition later cost him dearly.

”What I had done with Monica Lewinsky was immoral and foolish,” he says in the book. ”I was deeply ashamed of it and I didn’t want it to come out. In the deposition [in which he denied ”sexual relations”] I was trying to protect my family and myself from my selfish stupidity.”

He sees the affair as a resurfacing of ”old demons”, dating back to his earliest years. ”I didn’t like everything I learned about myself or my past, and it pained me to face the fact that my childhood and the life I’d led since growing up had made some things difficult for me that seemed to come more naturally to other people.”

The book sheds some light on that, not only lovingly recalling the characters and adventures of a boyhood in 1950s Arkansas, but also revealing the pain of a boy unconfident about his looks and weight, raised in a household riven by ”abuse” — chiefly at the hands of his alcoholic and violent stepfather Roger Clinton. The former president says that it was at this young age that he learned to lead ”parallel lives”. ”When I was a child my outside life was filled with friends and fun, learning and doing. My internal life was full of uncertainty, anger and a dread of ever-looming violence. No one can live parallel lives with complete success; the two have to intersect.”

When faced with the Lewinsky allegations, he soon realised his tactic of denial was ”a terrible mistake” — but became determined not to let Starr use his sexual misbehaviour to drive him out of office. What appalled him most was that — as he fought on many legal fronts — he also found himself lying to his family and closest supporters.

”I was misleading everyone about my personal failings. I was embarrassed and wanted to keep it from my wife and daughter. I didn’t want to help Ken Starr criminalise my personal life, and I didn’t want the American people to know how I’d let them down. It was like living a nightmare. Though she was right about the nature of our opposition, seeing Hillary defend me made me even more ashamed about what I had done.”

He finally broke the truth to Hillary after a ”miserable, sleepless night” on August 15 1998. ”She looked at me as if I had punched her in the gut, almost as angry at me for lying to her in January as for what I had done. All I could do was tell her I was sorry … I still didn’t fully understand why I had done something so wrong and stupid; that understanding would come slowly, in the months of working on our relationship that lay ahead.”

Later the same day he talked to Chelsea. ”I was afraid that I would lose not only my marriage, but my daughter’s love and respect as well.”

That same day, the news was dominated by the Omagh bomb, which killed 28 people. In the following days Hillary and Chelsea were supportive in public. In private they were barely speaking to Clinton, who was now sleeping on a couch in a small living room adjoining the couple’s bedroom. ”I deserved a kicking, all right, but I was getting it at home, where it should have been administered.”

When pressed, Clinton offers a political analysis for the ”hysteria” which led to his impeachment. He describes an ever more bitter fight between the right and the left over the role of government, a picture complicated by the rise of the fundamentalist Christian right. He argues that, rather than fight on ideology, the right increasingly targets the personal lives of progressive public figures, whom they genuinely believe morally unfit for office. He urges Democrats to stick to arguments — which they can win — rather than personal vendettas.

We ask whether, as a Christian himself, he had been able to forgive Starr. ”I couldn’t have done it without two people, both in Africa,” he says. ”One was a Rwandan woman, a survivor of the slaughter. She lived next to a Hutu couple. Their children played together for 10 years. The couple rat ’em out. They come and crack her across the back with a machete and she’s left for dead. She wakes up in a pool of blood and looks around and her husband and her six children are dead. She’s the only survivor. And she said, ‘I screamed at God for letting me live with all them dead and then I realised I must have been spared for some purpose. It could not be something as mean as vengeance.’

”What was the lesson for me? What I went through was a tea party compared to that woman. I lost nothing compared to what she did. You know, I had my reputation in tatters, I was bankrupted, I was enraged because other people were persecuted who were completely innocent. It was nothing.

”The other person who helped me was Nelson Mandela. He told me he forgave his oppressors because if he didn’t they would have destroyed him. He said: ‘You know, they already took everything. They took the best years of my life, I didn’t get to see my children grow up. They destroyed my marriage. They abused me physically and mentally. They could take everything except my mind and heart. Those things I would have to give away and I decided not to give them away.’

”And then he said: ‘Neither should you.’ And he said when he was finally set free he felt all that anger welling up again and he said, ‘They’ve already had me for 27 years … I had to let it go’. You do this not for other people but for yourself. If you don’t let go it continues to eat at you.”

Clinton was finally allowed back off the couch at some unspecified time after admitting his infidelity to Hillary and being cleared by the Senate. ”I almost wound up being grateful to my tormentors: they were probably the only people who could have made me look good to Hillary again.”

Hillary — the next Clinton presidency?

The current book tour is the latest Clinton campaign — but it’s unlikely to be the last. What of the former president’s wife, now in the Senate representing New York? Does she have what it takes to be president?

He smiles at the thought. She considered running this year, he admits, but instead ”wanted to honour her commitment to the people of New York” to serve a full term in the senate. Political convention demands that he say Kerry will triumph this year? ”He has a slightly better than 50-50 chance to win,” says Clinton — and that therefore there will be no Democratic vacancy for eight years. So maybe that could be Hillary’s moment?

”We have no idea what the future holds. If, you know, eight years from now or sometime in the future she got a chance to serve, I have no doubt about her skills. She is the ablest person I’ve ever known in public life. And she does some things better than I do, better than I ever do. She is very well organised, she is very strong … I have no doubt she could do it … Who knows what will happen in the future?”

We ask him about the red and blue crocheted band around his right wrist — an incongruous clash with the statesman attire. For the first time in the interview he becomes emotional, the voice catching and his eyes redening. ”I’ve worn it for two years. I went there [to Colombia] and met these unbelievable kids from a village on the edge of the rainforest where the narco-traffickers are dominant,” he says. ”They sang and danced for peace and I fell in love with these kids. I asked them to perform at the White House one Christmas. They came with the culture minister, a magnificently attractive woman called Consuelo. The bad guys hated these kids because they made them look like what they are. The guerillas couldn’t kill these children, so they murdered her … I can still hardly talk about this.

”Two years ago they asked me back and I said, ‘I’ll come, but you’ve got to bring those kids to see me.’ So I turn up — and the children greeted me at the airport, along with the new culture minister — the niece of the murdered woman. And they gave me this bracelet, which I’ve never taken off.”

And, with that, he is up on his feet, posing for a photograph and out — ready for the next stop in the campaign that never ends.

From tubby child to a handshake with Castro — Bill Clinton in his own words

On the influence of his grandmother

[My grandmother] Mammaw’s main goals for me were that I would eat a lot, learn a lot and always be neat and clean … These early instructions probably explain why I now read a lot, battle my weight and never forget to wash my hands and brush my teeth.

On being a fat child

The rope in the playground was tied at one end to a tree and at the other end to a swing set. The kids would line up on one side and take turns running and jumping over it. All the other kids cleared the rope … Me, I didn’t clear the rope. I was a little chunky anyway, and slow, so slow that I was once the only kid at an Easter egg hunt who didn’t get a single egg, not because I couldn’t find them but because I couldn’t get to them fast enough. On the day I tried to jump rope I was wearing cowboy boots to school. Like a fool, I didn’t take the boots off to jump. My heel caught on the rope, I turned, fell and heard my leg snap.

On his violent stepfather

One night [my stepfather’s] drunken self-destructiveness came to a head in a fight with my mother I can’t ever forget … They were screaming at each other in their bedroom in the back of the house. For some reason, I walked out into the hall to the doorway of the bedroom. Just as I did, Daddy pulled a gun from behind his back and fired in Mother’s direction. The bullet went into the wall between where she and I were standing. I was stunned and so scared … I can still see them leading Daddy away in handcuffs to jail … I’m sure Daddy didn’t mean to hurt her and he would have died if the bullet had accidentally hit either of us. But something more poisonous than alcohol drove him to that level of debasement.

On standing up to his stepfather

One night Daddy closed the door to his bedroom, started screaming at Mother, then began to hit her … Finally I couldn’t bear the thought of Mother being hurt and [brother] Roger being frightened any more. I grabbed a golf club out of my bag and threw open their door, Mother was on the floor and Daddy was standing over her beating on her, I told him to stop and that if he didn’t I was going to beat the hell out of him with the golf club. He just caved … it made me sick.

The books that he says got him through Monicagate

The Imitations of Christ by Thomas à Kempis (classic Christian text that deals with pride, suffering, self-centredness, materialism and anxiety).

The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius (putting Stoicism into practise as a means of coping with adversity).

Seventy Times Seven by Johann Christoph Arnold (reflection on the stories of ”real people” who have dealt with injuries from crime and betrayal and abuse, that stresses forgiveness as the only way of surviving life’s deepest hurts).

John 8:7 (”Let he that is without sin…”)

On shaking hands with Castro

[At the UN a giant Namibian official] moved on, revealing a last greeter who had been invisible behind him: Fidel Castro. Castro stuck out his hand and I shook it, the first president to do so in more than 40 years. He said he didn’t wish to cause me any trouble, but wanted to pay his respects before I left office. I replied that I hoped that someday our nations would be reconciled.

On tactics for avoiding attack at Islamabad airport

We went into two small planes, one with US Air Force markings, the other, in which I was riding, painted plain white.

On the Queen

I was taken with her grace and intelligence and the clever manner in which she discussed public issues, probing me for information and insights