Living History (69 page)

Tony and Cherie, both barristers, the English term for trial lawyers, had met as clerks at one of the Inns of Court. A mother of three in 1997 when her husband became Prime Minister, Cherie continued her legal work, taking on difficult criminal cases as well as representing clients in the European Court of Human Rights. In 1995, she was named a QC (Queen’s Counsel)―a great honor―and served from time to time as a judge. I admired the way she pursued her profession, even taking on cases where she had to argue against the government. She specialized in employment litigation, and several of her clients were notable, even controversial. In 1998, she represented a gay worker employed by the national railroad in his claim to equal rights with his non-gay peers. I could not imagine a First Lady suing the government of the United States under comparable circumstances!

As the spouse of a new Prime Minister, Cherie suddenly faced an onslaught of public demands and responsibilities, and she had no extra staff help, except two part-time aides to handle scheduling and correspondence. The wife of a Prime Minister has a less symbolic role than a First Lady because the Queen or other members of the Royal Family perform many of those duties. When Cherie and I met, she was eager to discuss with me any ideas about how she could manage her responsibilities. I encouraged her to be herself, a difficult undertaking, I’d discovered, and tried to reinforce her instincts to shield her children, keeping them as far out of the tabloid spotlight as possible. Cherie had already been baptized by fire when, early the morning after the election, she opened the door of her private home to collect a flower delivery, only to be photographed in her nightclothes.

When she, Tony, Bill and I met over a long dinner at Le Pont de la Tour, a restaurant near the Tower of London on the Thames River, the conversation never stalled. We shared ideas about problems in education and welfare and our concerns about the pervasive influence of the media. Over the course of dinner, we decided to initiate a discussion among our advisers to explore common ideas and strategies.

Organizing the first meeting took months, because of resistance from officials in each of our countries. The National Security Council and British Foreign Office worried that we would offend other friendly nations and governments by holding meetings that included only the United States and Britain. I countered that if the socalled special relationship between our countries meant anything, surely bilateral, informal meetings should not offend our other allies. Bill and I persevered because we knew that each of our countries could learn from the other and create a constructive political environment. We did make concessions, however. In order to limit attention, Bill would not attend the first meeting that Tony wanted to host at Chequers. We also decided to focus on domestic issues, skirting the possible foreign policy implications of bilateral meetings and recognizing that in an era of globalization, domestic policy now has significant international consequences.

The final list of participating Americans included Melanne; Al From; Sid Blumenthal, by then an Assistant to the President; Andrew Cuomo, Secretary of Housing and Urban Development; Larry Summers, then Deputy Secretary of the Treasury; Frank Raines, Director of the Office of Management and Budget; speechwriter and consultant Don Baer and Professor Joseph Nye from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Blair invited Anthony Giddens, Director of the London School of Economics, and members of his government, including Gordon Brown, Chancellor of the Exchequer; Peter Mandelson, Minister without Portfolio; Baroness Margaret Jay, Deputy Leader of the House of Lords; and David Miliband, Director of Policy.

I left Washington on October 30, stopping first in Dublin and Belfast. The new Irish Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, hosted a large reception in St. Patrick’s Hall at Dublin Castle.

Ahern, a savvy and affable politician, was proving to be an effective Prime Minister and strong supporter of the peace process. He had been separated from his wife for a number of years and maintained a long-term relationship with a lovely and lively woman, Celia Larkin. Their involvement was one of those public secrets that everyone knew but no one publicly acknowledged. Bertie chose the occasion of my visit to go public. As Ambassador Jean Kennedy Smith accompanied me onto the stage to address the crowd, Bertie and Celia walked up the stairs. The Irish press was electrified. As soon as Bertie and I finished speaking, they rushed for their phones and computers. The reporter for the Irish Times, Susan Garrity, who was based in Washington and had flown over with me to cover the trip, told me later that she overheard one reporter yelling into the phone, “I’m telling you, he put his mistress on the stage with the First Lady. Can you believe it? The First Lady!” This earthshaking news had no impact on the political fortunes of Ahern, who was reelected in 2002, and it certainly wasn’t a topic of conversation at the private dinner Bertie, Celia and I later attended with some of my favorite Irish, Seamus and Marie Heaney and Frank McCourt, author of Angela’s Ashes.

The next morning I flew to Belfast to deliver the first Joyce McCartan Memorial Lecture at the University of Ulster. I spoke of Joyce’s relentless commitment to peace and recognized the women like her who, despite their own personal losses, had contributed to greater understanding between the traditions during the Troubles and who were now playing a role in the peace process. I especially admired Monica McWilliams and Pearl Sager, who were representing the Women’s Coalition at the talks taking place under former Senator George Mitchell, whom Bill had appointed to chair the negotiations.

On this trip, I witnessed firsthand the importance of ongoing contacts between Catholics and Protestants at a roundtable discussion of young people from both communities held in the new Waterfront Hall, a monument to Belfast’s optimism about the future.

Conferences such as this supported the peace process and brought together students who would not likely have met under any other circumstances. They lived in segregated neighborhoods and went to rigidly sectarian schools. I’ll long remember what one young man said to me when I asked what he thought it would take to establish lasting peace.

“We need to go to school together like you do in America,” he replied.

One reason I support improving our public school system through higher standards and greater accountability and oppose weakening it through vouchers is that it brings together children of all races, religions and backgrounds, and has shaped and sustained our pluralistic democracy. Very few countries in the world benefit from such diversity in education. As our society grows ever more diverse, it will become even more important for children to study together and learn to tolerate and respect their differences as they affirm their common humanity.

Also attending the Belfast conference was Marjorie “Mo” Mowlam, Tony Blair’s Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. Mo had recently completed debilitating treatments for a nonmalignant brain tumor, which had caused her hair to fall out. She wore a wig and later asked if I’d mind if she took it off. I learned that she did this at official meetings, exposing her bald head with its few wisps of blond hair. I wondered whether removing her wig was a subtle way of suggesting that she had nothing to hide in her work on behalf of the peace process―or a not so subtle reminder that she was a woman more interested in substance than show. Mo became a delightful new friend.

I flew from Belfast to London and then drove forty miles north to Buckinghamshire, where Chequers sits on one thousand acres of rolling English countryside, its grounds lined with stone paths and manicured gardens. An immense front door signals the entrance to the redbrick manor house that has served as a weekend getaway for Prime Ministers since 1921, after the estate was bequeathed to the British government. Tony met me at the door wearing blue jeans and his trademark boyish grin.

That evening, the Blairs, Melanne and I enjoyed a private dinner and stayed up late into the night, sitting in front of the large stone fireplace in the Great Hall, talking about a broad array of subjects ranging from Yeltsin and his inner circle to French perfidy vis-àvis Iran and Iraq to U.S. involvement in Bosnia. We also discussed what Tony called the “cellular fatigue” that seems to come with public life these days and the connection between our religious faith and public service. Both of us rooted our political beliefs in our faith, which molded our commitment to social action. I talked about John Wesley’s invocation, which I had taken to heart when I was confirmed in the Methodist faith―Live every day doing as much good as you can, in every way that you can―and about what theologians have described as “the push of duty and the pull of grace.”

The next morning, the other American and British participants arrived. Over coffee in the Great Parlor on the second floor, we discussed policies that could support families in their primary functions of raising children, as well as education and employment policies.

After our discussions, we walked through the gardens, looking out over the lush green meadow that seemed to stretch to the horizon. England can be gray and wet in late autumn, but on this day the sky was deep blue and the sun was bright, making the surroundings vivid with color. As I looked beyond the lawns and rosebushes, I realized that although Chequers was guarded and secure, there was no visible fence or any indication that it was a secluded government facility.

At dinner, I sat next to Tony Giddens, a brilliant and prolific scholar who has written extensively about the Third Way. Giddens told me that when the history of the bloody twentieth century is written, the advancing status of women will be seen as a historic change, as profound as the extraordinary march of technology and the successful defense and proliferation of Western democracy.

As soon as we got back to the United States, Sid and I briefed Bill and recommended that he continue the Third Way meetings, which he did. He hosted one at the White House in the Blue Room during the Blairs’ official visit in 1998, and convened follow-up meetings that included other like-minded leaders, including Italian President Romano Prodi and Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson at New York University in September 1998, and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, Italian Premier Massimo D’Alema and Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso in Florence in November 1999.

These Third Way meetings introduced a new way for the Administration to work with America’s traditional allies. And we had few allies better than Italy. Bill and I had visited Tuscany and Venice in 1987 with a group of Governors, and I looked for any excuse to return. In 1994 we traveled to Naples for the G-7 Summit, hosted by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. I fulfilled a lifelong desire to explore Neapolitan art and culture, and to visit Pompeii, Ravello and the Amalfi Coast. I wished I could have lingered there, or at least returned by now. Similarly, when we made our state visit to Rome, I enjoyed every moment, and I was delighted when Florence was chosen for the Third Way Conference co-hosted by New York University under the leadership of John Sexton, then Dean of the Law School, now President of the University. These visits to Italy gave me the chance to spend time with a succession of Prime Ministers―Berlusconi, Prodi, D’Alema and Carlo Ciampi, all of whom were good allies, particularly on Bosnia, Kosovo and NATO expansion.

In Palermo, Sicily, I attended a Vital Voices leadership training program and spoke in the restored Opera House at a conference sponsored by Leoluca Orlando, the Mayor of Palermo. Orlando believed in the power of culture to change lives and societies. He had led a grassroots campaign to take back Palermo from the grip of the Mafia. He organized schoolchildren to “adopt” a monument that they would care for as a way to instill values of civic responsibility and caring. He spoke often to clergy and business leaders to encourage them to assist him in ending the reign of terror the people were living under. Finally, after a series of cold-blooded assassinations of public officials, the women of Palermo had had enough. They hung bedsheets from their windows, proclaiming in bold letters: BASTA―Enough. This collective show of power combined with popular demonstrations turned the tide in Sicily’s long struggle with the Mafia.

Orlando’s creative governing was a living example of a Third Way approach to problem-solving that brought his people a respite from fear and violence. Openness to ideas for improving people’s lives is the hallmark of good leadership, but sometimes leaders need encouragement, especially if they are new democracies trying to implement principles of equality and self-government for the first time. The Administration thought that high-level visits were important in our efforts to forge diplomatic ties with nascent democracies.

And that’s how I came to be sitting on an airplane about to take off to Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Ukraine and Russia―Siberia, to be exact―some of the most remote locales I ever visited. But first we had to get there, which proved more nerveracking than expected.

Again, I was traveling with Kelly and Melanne, and with Karen Finney, my deputy press secretary, a tall young woman with great stamina and humor. We took off from Andrews Air Force Base on Sunday night, November 9, aboard a Boeing 707 that had been used in the past as Air Force One. We had been in the air about ten minutes and I had settled down with my briefing book about Kazakhstan, our first stop, when a crew member calmly told me that we had to return to Andrews because of problems with one of the engines. I wasn’t particularly worried. I knew a plane that size could easily fly on three of its four engines. And I had total confidence in Air Force pilots, the best in the world. I went back to my book.

We landed smoothly at Andrews with only three engines in operation and immediately were met by fire trucks with lights flashing. While mechanics investigated, I called Bill to tell him about the delay, hopeful that we would be able to take off again when the engine was fixed.

We finally got word a few hours later that we couldn’t leave until the next afternoon, so at midnight we all went home. When I arrived at the White House, I found Bill talking on the phone to Chelsea, who was in her dorm and had seen a “Breaking News” report on CNN.com: “First Lady’s plane turns back … fuel dumped … everyone on board safe.” I got a call from my mother, who just wanted to hear my voice. Other friends phoned after seeing the headline in The Washington Post: FIRST LADY’S JET ABORTS; CENTRAL