Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton (14 page)

That uplifting vision was still no more than an architectural model on December 5, when a hastily assembled crowd of about two thousand friends and supporters showed up at the site. Many were unable to attend on short notice, but among those who did were Terry McAuliffe and David Kendall, as well as former White House chief of staff Thomas “Mack” McLarty, former White House political aide Craig Smith, and former White House advisers Bruce Reed and Tom Freedman. Their reward was a mountainous luncheon plate—including an entire barbecued chicken, a turkey leg, a pork sandwich, a few sausage links, and a portion of beef brisket, all courtesy of a locally renowned businessman and philanthropist named Jennings Osborne.

From the former president—after the benediction by a local rabbi and a quick introduction by Skip Rutherford, who noted that Hillary had been detained in Washington by pressing Senate votes—the audience heard an unusually concise and circumspect speech.

Clinton began by recalling “the very first groundbreaking of a presidential library, by our neighbors in Missouri,” in May 1955, when construction started on Harry Truman’s library. He paused for timing. “At the time, they commented on the astonishing sum—$1,750,000,” he said, as the audience roared.

He went on to speak briefly about the achievements of his administration, which he described as eight years of “peace, prosperity, social justice, and social progress,” but noted the failures too, particularly the defeat of universal health care. He talked about his belief in public service, the dangerous world that America would confront after 9/11, and the “bridge to the 21st century” that had served as the theme of his reelection campaign and had since been adopted by Polshek and Olcott as the reigning metaphor for the library design.

And then he read from one of the documents that would someday be displayed there—a letter, he said, written by a grieving young widow, following the sudden death of her husband in an automobile accident.

“It seemed almost unbearable at the time,” wrote Virginia Blythe, the president’s late mother, to a friend in Chicago. “But you see, I am six months pregnant, and the thought of our baby keeps me going and really gives me the whole world before me.” With a hand wiping his eyes, Clinton said he hoped that he hadn’t “let her down.”

In the next day’s
Washington Post
, reporter John Harris perceived a “jab” in Clinton’s speech at his successor, when the former president promised that visitors to his library would be able to peruse documents pertinent to presidential decisions “when the classification period ends—and at this library, it will end.” That remark seemed to refer to the Presidential Records Act Executive Order, issued by George W. Bush a month earlier, which allowed former presidents the right to extend the period during which documents remain under seal. Historians and journalists had protested the order, amid speculation that Bush was trying to protect his father from unwanted revelations about his conduct during the first Bush presidency and the Reagan years.

For Clinton, with his legacy under fire, the legitimacy of the library’s portrayal of his presidency—and its scholarly acceptance—would concern him as much as its architectural quality and popular success. At the groundbreaking, Bruce Reed told the
Post
: “George Orwell was right. He who controls the past controls the future.”

Unable to control the past in Orwellian style, Clinton still hoped to influence the future. When he concluded his speech, he picked up a gold-painted shovel and dug into the earth. The library would be built and he could turn toward his own future.

With the advent of 2002 came a new regime in Clinton’s office. After nearly a year of building out the human and physical infrastructure of the foundation—and exhausting herself in the process—chief of staff Karen Tramontano had departed to pursue her own ideas for an international nonprofit and consulting work. She was replaced by Margaret “Maggie” Williams, another trusted colleague who had endured the administration’s very worst times, following the suicide of White House counsel Vincent Foster, during which her role as an adviser to both Clintons had led to threats of indictment, awful press coverage, and more than $300,000 in personal legal expenses. After that searing experience, it was not at all clear why Maggie Williams should ever want to return to work for Bill Clinton—especially when she already had a plum job in Washington as president of Fenton Communications, the largest progressive public relations firm in the capital.

Before Clinton left office, she had been approached by Bruce Lindsey to work in the post-presidential apparatus, and she had said no. But when Tramontano finally had to be replaced, Lindsey had approached Williams again for help in finding a new chief of staff—and she had gone to see her former boss to discuss the possibilities.

At a meeting in his spacious but still unfinished office on 125th Street, Williams had listened in captivated silence as Clinton energetically held forth—for nearly two hours—on the lives of some of the men who had preceded him as post-presidents.

Leaning back in his chair, he conjured stories of John Quincy Adams, whose crusade against the slave trade after leaving the White House proved more consequential than anything he had done as president; of Teddy Roosevelt, whose action-packed post-presidency had included a bird-and-game collecting expedition in Africa, an extremely perilous exploration of the Amazon rain forest that almost killed him, a triumphal tour of European capitals, and a second presidential campaign as the founder of a new political party; and of Jimmy Carter,
whose successes in overcoming the tropical disease known as river blindness, overseeing democratic elections abroad, and speaking out for the dispossessed Palestinians in the Holy Land, seemed most likely to serve as some kind of model for Clinton.

“We’ll have some fun!” he concluded, with a mischievous smile, perhaps sensing that she was hooked in spite of herself.

When Williams returned home to Paris, she told her husband, William Barrett—a professional diplomat who had been working for Ambassador Felix Rohatyn at the U.S. embassy—that they might soon be moving to New York. Trying to explain, she described the former president’s lecture on post-presidencies as “one of the most incredible journeys I’ve ever taken. He was telling the story straight, yet it was so visual and so fascinating. There is just so much he could do.”

What made Clinton’s historical recital thrilling, as she came to understand, was that every one of the successful post-presidents had found a higher purpose to pursue with passion. Now, a full year after leaving the White House, Clinton was still groping toward that kind of galvanizing mission.

When Williams showed up in Harlem to take over the stewardship of Clinton’s post-presidency, she saw her own mission as “professionalizing” his office. She instantly understood the need for a highly skilled public relations professional, the critical missing element during the early firestorm over the last-minute pardons. She wanted a foreign policy professional to oversee Clinton’s relationships with foreign governments and leaders, which she regarded as “integral to his brand.” And she wanted to make sure that the correspondence and communications functions would continue to function at a presidential level, which she regarded as essential to preserving the Clinton “brand.”

Yet even the most skillful branding wouldn’t mean much—and would diminish rapidly over time—unless it came to stand for something active and substantive. Clinton and his advisers had mulled this problem rather fitfully for months, without reaching any firm conclusion, even as he continued to make speeches and pull in money for the library in Little Rock.

In the meantime, just as Williams arrived in Harlem, Clinton once
again became a target of convenience in the Washington scandal culture.

For months, the ongoing financial implosion of the Enron Corporation—a freewheeling energy conglomerate based in Houston with more than $60 billion in assets—had threatened to pull major political figures, including President George W. Bush and his advisers, into the maelstrom of the largest corporate bankruptcy in history. Replete with complicated bogus accounting schemes, executive corruption, massive exploitation of consumers, and cynical manipulation of federal agencies and elected officials, the Enron affair was a growing source of embarrassment to the White House and Republicans in Congress. Bush and Enron chief Kenneth Lay, who had donated enormous sums to the GOP, were on intimate terms—the president was known to refer to Lay as “Kenny Boy” on their frequent golf outings in Texas.

Fearing the scandal’s potential consequences in the 2002 midterm elections, Republican operatives were busily seeking to lay at least a share of blame upon the Democrats, by proving that both parties benefited from Enron’s political largesse. The raw numbers showed otherwise, but that wouldn’t matter if Republicans gained control of the media narrative. What they needed was another partisan scapegoat, preferably with a familiar face.

On January 11, the
Drudge Report
—which had broken the Monica Lewinsky scandal online almost exactly four years earlier—ran a short item designed to prove that the Clintons, not the Bushes, were the true stooges of Enron. According to Drudge, “[Ken] Lay also played golf with President Bill Clinton and slept in the Clinton White House.” Matt Drudge refused to disclose the source of this allegation, saying only, “Lay’s direct ties to Clinton are well documented.”

Drudge’s power to steer mainstream coverage was considerable; within two days, the
Chicago Tribune
’s Washington bureau produced an article detailing Enron’s bipartisan favor seeking in the capital. “Lay was no stranger to the Clinton White House,” wrote the
Tribune
correspondent, “playing golf with the president and staying overnight in the Lincoln Bedroom.”

From there the tale migrated overnight to Fox News, where
Weekly Standard
editor Fred Barnes declared that Enron wasn’t really a Republican scandal at all, because “Ken Lay not only played golf with
Clinton, he spent a night in the Lincoln Bedroom.” Within moments, a Republican consultant made the same claim on CNN, telling viewers that “Ken Lay slept in the Lincoln Bedroom,” hosted by Clinton. During the weeks that followed, the story appeared in numerous other publications, from New York, Washington, and Arkansas to South Korea, Australia, and England, where the
Times
of London reprinted a version. Meanwhile Fox continued to repeat the allegation, over and over.

Actually, Lay had not set foot in the White House while Clinton was president, nor had they ever played golf together—as Gene Lyons reported in the
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
. To Clinton’s intense frustration, almost nobody picked up the Lyons column or his own denials for weeks. But eventually, under pressure from readers protesting the falsehood, the
Chicago Tribune
issued a retraction, as did several other papers. Frank James, the
Tribune
reporter whose byline had appeared on the original erroneous article, explained with surprising candor that he had transposed the memory of a Lay sleepover in the White House during the first Bush administration into a Clinton event. James hadn’t bothered to call anyone to check before committing his flawed recollection to print.

And the Bush White House, eager to draw moral contrasts with Clinton from the beginning, had again showed its willingness to blot his reputation for political convenience. Beneath the surface pleasantries, a state of cold war still prevailed between the former president and his successor. And Clinton, still scarred by the impeachment and pardons, remained vulnerable to almost any smear.

Not long after Maggie Williams arrived, she and Clinton agreed on an idea that had percolated in his mind for several months: The foundation should spearhead a program to assist small businesses in Harlem, as a gesture toward fulfilling the former president’s promise to be a “good neighbor.” Helping local restaurants and beauty parlors would scarcely transform the neighborhood, which was already beginning to change thanks to the historic drop in urban crime and rising rents across the city. What it might do is mitigate the gentrifying impact of Clinton’s own presence on 125th Street, which had already drawn sporadic protests despite his local popularity.

To oversee the program, Maggie Williams brought in another former Clinton White House veteran named Clyde Williams—no relation to her—whose energy and ambition had impressed the president as he rose from a position on the domestic policy staff to deputy chief of staff in the Department of Agriculture.

Clyde Williams had grown up in the tough Southeast quadrant of the District of Columbia, pretty much on his own since adolescence, and had then worked his way through Howard University by waiting tables. He had moved to a stylish brownstone in Harlem with his wife, Mona Sutphen, a former National Security Council staffer, near Marcus Garvey Park. She worked for the Swiss bank UBS and although both were African American, they might be viewed as emblematic of the community’s gentrification dilemma.

The proposal that Clyde Williams devised over the first few months of 2002 was straightforward in conception but ambitious in the details. Business specialists from Booz Allen Hamilton, the management consulting giant, and New York University’s Stern School of Business would be asked to provide counseling to ten small Harlem enterprises as a pilot project. Some of the businesses would be well established, some would be recent start-ups, but no franchises, no fast-food joints, and no chain stores would be accepted. Williams also brought in the Greater Harlem Chamber of Commerce, the Harlem Business Alliance, and the National Black MBA Association as partners to give the project—quickly dubbed the Harlem Small Business Initiative—an additional layer of acceptance and authenticity.

Both Clinton and Maggie Williams found this plan appealing because, as she later said, bringing the highest-priced consultants in the country to the people of Harlem “showed such respect.”

Within a few months, Clyde Williams and the team from Booz Allen had settled on selection criteria. For the first round, they chose firms that represented community values, including the Heaven’s Hat Boutique on Adam Clayton Powell Junior Boulevard, where Evetta Petty designed and sold hundreds of varieties of stylish millinery, many of them made-to-order; the Pan Pan Restaurant, a landmark soul-food diner serving chicken and waffles for more than three decades, where Clinton had lunched several times; Dee’s Card and Wedding Services, a purveyor of handmade black-themed greeting cards, artisan crafts,
and gift items; a fancy new florist on Malcolm X Boulevard; and a video store, an independent insurance agency, a pharmacist, a plumber, and a dentist.