Clinton, Inc.: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine (15 page)

Clinton maintained a look of skepticism. But as the conversation in the room turned to other matters, the former president disappeared.

“I didn’t think anything of it at the time,” Nicholson recalls now, though he soon learned where Clinton went.

The former president wandered down the corridor of the presidential plane and, as if by happenstance, soon found himself in the small compartment in the back of the plane reserved for the press corps. The reporters aboard Air Force One pay for these cramped quarters, where the communication equipment is poor and actual news rare—but they do it for quality time with high-ranking officials. And on this trip, they were lucky. Clinton was happy to glad-hand them, stroke their egos (and his), and take part in his favorite pastime: political gossip. When the conversation turned to the successor for Pope John Paul II, Clinton held forth with a knowledgeable gaze.

“I think it’s going to be Ratzinger,” Clinton predicted, making it seem like all along his own thoughtful analysis had led him to what would be a prophetic conclusion. “A German. He’s got a lot of momentum.”

Reporters started scribbling. Many undoubtedly were dazzled once again by Bill Clinton’s legendary political acumen. And they would be even more impressed when the prediction soon turned out to be correct.

Nicholson shakes his head as he recounts this. “Typical Clinton,” he says. And soon he and others among the delegation would get other glimpses of the former president, with whom they’d spend the next two and a half days.

First, of course, was the talking. “He talks all the time,” said one of the passengers aboard that flight. “He just wears you out.”

“He tells a lot of stories,” a Clinton intimate tells me. “Some of them I’ve heard four hundred, five hundred times, but it is what it is. I think that’s why people cycle through. It’s kind of enjoyable for the first six months and then, you know . . .”

“He would dominate the conversation on all sorts of topics,” Nicholson says. “Sometimes we’d be in a conversation that would trigger a thought of his, and he would start talking about something that was related to that, either related to an experience of his, or somebody that he knew, or something . . . and he would just go on with that, even though the other conversation might continue as well. It was odd to me. It was like he was sitting over there, and you and I were having a chat about the Nationals, and if there was something else on his mind, he’d be talking about it.”

Clinton talked so much, one Bush official said, that he’d exhaust the attention of both of the Bushes. “You could see Dubya’s mind drifting off,” the official said.

Clinton’s now-famous bond with the Bush family—and the larger BushWorld in general—was a key element in the rebuilding of the Clinton “brand.” Indeed, it may well rank as one of Bill Clinton’s most ambitious and personally rewarding achievements, one that not only had been a decade in the making, but was in effect a master class in Clinton’s ability to win friends and influence people. Despite the glossy spin now put on the relationship, the Arkansan had had a steep hill to climb.

On November 3, 1992, after an economic recession and a hard-fought three-way race for the presidency, Arkansas governor Bill Clinton defeated incumbent George H. W. Bush by a margin of 43 percent to 37 percent (with 19 percent for third-party candidate H. Ross Perot). The defeat was seen as an embarrassing rebuke to the sitting president, who had earned acclaim only a year earlier for the liberation of Kuwait from Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. At the time, it also seemed to place a period on the Bush family’s political fortunes. Looking back on his father’s defeat years later, George Walker Bush remembers no ill will. “Dad had been raised to be a good sport,” Bush wrote in his bestselling memoir,
Decision Points.
“He blamed no one; he was not bitter.”
5
As Bush writes, his father called Clinton that evening to offer a gracious concession—which began, as George W. Bush put it, “one of the more unlikely friendships in American political history.”
6

“What a lot of people don’t realize is we’ve never really been hostile,” the elder George Bush once said to an interviewer. “You get into a campaign and there’s understandable hostility. But I’ve always had a rather pleasant personal relationship with him. . . . So it’s not surprising to us. But it is surprising to everybody else.”
7

Although there is significant evidence today that the senior George Bush and Bill Clinton have moved beyond their 1992 election and become close friends, the sunny version of that pairing—that the two grew to appreciate each other almost as soon as the smoke cleared in 1992—is not consistent with the facts. The real story is more complicated, more interesting, and far more revealing.

The 1992 loss was understandably painful for the hypercompetitive Bush family. Indeed, it was so painful that it might well have altered history. For much of the next decade, family members lashed out in very personal terms at the man who had vanquished their beloved patriarch. George W. Bush, in particular, was said to be furious over his father’s defeat—“the better man lost,” he seethed on election night—and lashed out at the media for its bias. He was not alone. His mother, Barbara, recalled writing in her diary “over and over again that Bill Clinton did not have a chance.” She was sure that “The American people would never vote for him.”
8

In Houston on election night in 1992, while most of the Bush clan received news of election returns together, Mrs. Bush spent much of the time reading a romance novel in another room, as if refusing to consider the possibility of defeat.
9

“We saw a good man, and a great leader, brought down by distortion, innuendo, and fabrication,” said Bush’s daughter, Dorothy (Doro), who went on to compare Clinton to Richard Nixon.

George H. W. Bush apparently agreed. He considered Clinton a “sleazeball” who “dodged” the draft, as one Bush biographer put it.
10
“I remember many conversations with President Bush when he was incredulous about Clinton’s lead,” the Republican Party chairman Rich Bond recalled. “He’d say, ‘How can voters support someone of so little integrity?’ ”

At Camp David, the presidential retreat in Maryland, a depressed Bush reached out to a visiting Colin Powell, then serving as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“Colin, it hurts,” Bush told him. “It really hurts. I never thought they’d pick him.”

“I know it does,” Powell replied. “It has to.”
11

George W. Bush, who could be peevish and petty, made a point of saying at the opening of his father’s presidential library in 1997 that his father “left [office] with his integrity intact.”
12
It was meant to be a poke at Bill Clinton, who was in attendance and did not miss any of the implications of Bush’s reference to integrity. “Of course,” Clinton later said, “he’s never forgiven me for beating his father.”
13

The animus toward the Clintons extended all the way through George W. Bush’s successful 2000 presidential campaign. At one point, when Clinton mocked then-governor Bush’s qualifications for the job—“How bad could I be? I’ve been governor of Texas. My daddy was president. I own a baseball team. . . . Their fraternity had it for eight years, give it to ours for eight years”—the Bushes unleashed their not-well-contained fury.
14
The elder Bush, for example, warned reporters that the attacks on his son might prompt him to tell Americans what he really thinks about Clinton “as a human being and a person.”
15

A former high-level Clinton aide scoffs at the revisionism of the Bush-Clinton relationship. “George Bush Senior—he
hated
us,” he tells me. “The reason W. ran [for president] was to avenge the loss of his father to that trailer trash, Bill Clinton.”

There is, in fact, significant support for that assertion, and from Bush’s fellow Republicans. In 1999, for example, as George W. Bush mounted his campaign for the White House, California congressman James Rogan faced a tough reelection in his swing district, in part because of Rogan’s prominent and controversial role as one of the managers of Bill Clinton’s impeachment.

Knowing that then-Texas governor Bush was considering a White House bid, Rogan joined a small number of his colleagues to endorse him. Throughout 1999, Bush made a few visits to Washington, meeting with various advisors and fund-raisers—a group that included Rogan and some of the other early boosters.

Rogan recalled for me an unusual encounter with Bush while visiting with him in a private meeting room at the Library of Congress. “We had a whole bunch of congressmen in there—and, you know, I’m just one of four hundred and thirty-five members of the House,” Rogan, now a judge in California, tells me by telephone. “But [Bush] grabbed me by the arm and he was calling me ‘Jimmy,’ and he said in that Texas twang, ‘You know, Jimmy. I know your district. Glendale, Pasadena, Burbank.’ He named the cities in my district.”

“I know they’re coming after you,” Bush told the embattled congressman. “I want you to know something: I’m going to be there for you. I’m going to be there campaigning with you. I’m going to be there helping you raise money.”

Rogan was taken aback. “You know, here’s this presidential candidate, or he’s about to become one, who’s taking the time to actually research my district to know that I’m in trouble,” he says. “I said something like, ‘I’m really impressed.’ ”

In response Bush offered a “steely” look. Grabbing the congressman and pulling him in close, he whispered, “You avenged my father.”

Equating a vote for the impeachment of Bill Clinton with avenging George H. W. Bush’s political defeat “never dawned on me,” Rogan says. “I never connected any dots until Bush said it to me and then I thought, ‘Oh, yeah, okay, sure, well, that’s why he knows about my district. I mean something to him. He was watching these guys taking cannon fire, stand up in a very unpopular process to the guy that beat his dad.’ ” In the end, Bush wouldn’t actually be there for Rogan. During a swing before the November election, Bush’s campaign would view impeachment too warily to allow him to stand next to Rogan. Days later the incumbent congressman would be defeated by Democrat Adam Schiff.

By the time the Bushes returned to the White House, they felt a greater generosity of spirit toward those who’d vanquished them, and the relationship between the two famously feuding families found new contours. It was a relationship that Bill Clinton seemed determined to improve. The outgoing president—at the time a hated figure to Republicans and a source of exhaustion to many on the left—sensed the bonanza such a pairing offered.

The thaw began slowly, but immediately, in December 2000, only days after the U.S. Supreme Court ended a recount in Florida and in effect handed the presidential election to Bush. Heading to Washington to meet with his transition team, President-elect Bush paid a “courtesy call” visit to Clinton as well as the man he’d just so narrowly defeated.

“Al Gore was terrible to him,” a senior Bush aide recalls, as the Bushes arrived at the vice president’s residence on Massachusetts Avenue. For the Gores, the residence on the grounds of the U.S. Naval Observatory was a mere two and a half miles—and Florida’s twenty-five electoral votes—away from the White House. It had also, until a day or two earlier, been the site of round-the-clock protests by Bush supporters, who wore “Sore-Loserman” T-shirts (a play on the Gore-Lieberman ticket) and chanted through the gates and into the Gores’ bedroom, “Get out of Cheney’s house!”

This was the first presidential motorcade for the incoming Bush administration. One of the new members of Bush’s detail opened the door for Bush and watched the president-elect and his wife, Laura, exit the car and walk up the steps, across the covered white porch, and into the Gores’ residence. Soon—much sooner than Bush’s aides expected—Bush reemerged from the mansion, grim-faced and irritated.

“Okay, let’s go,” he said.

“They’d only been in there for like thirty seconds,” an aide reflects with amazement. (The awkward meeting, which Karl Rove later described as “tense and cold,” was actually closer to fifteen minutes.)
16

“Gore’s a prick,” a senior Bush press aide says. “He’s not the kind of person that has the ability to lead at that level, I believe, because he’s a jerk.”

Due to the unique circumstances, the Bush-Gore meeting was all but fated to be tense and perfunctory. But in any event it stood in sharp contrast to the reception the Bushes received minutes later at the White House from Bill and Hillary Clinton.

“They were just warmly welcomed,” a Bush aide later reflects. A “relaxed, even funny” Clinton, as described by Karl Rove, treated Bush to a steak while Hillary showed Laura the family quarters. Clinton oozed with ingratiation, even complimenting the tie worn by one of Bush’s aides. The current and future president dined together for ninety minutes, while Clinton held forth on the economy, advised on North Korea, and, at Bush’s request, offered his successor pointers on giving speeches. (The key, he said, was timing.)

That Gore and Clinton by that point all but hated each other probably made Clinton’s overture even more palatable. As a former senator puts it, “You get the feeling that Clinton acts like he likes Bush a lot better than he ever liked Al Gore.” The not-so-secret truth was that the Clintons weren’t heartbroken by Gore’s loss. Not only did Gore not quite fit the mold of a president in their eyes: A Republican in the White House also offered Hillary the chance for a potential run for the White House in 2004.

By the time Hillary made clear she would not challenge the Bushes, the Clinton-Bush relationship had really begun to flower.

Perhaps the first recorded defrost in the Clinton-Bush relationship occurred, of all places, at the White House itself. It was June 14, 2004, and hundreds were gathered at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for the ceremonial unveiling of the official portrait of President Clinton.