Clinton has now spent more time as a former president than he did as
president, a point he made to Hillary when they arrived home after Barack
Obama’s inauguration. “I looked at her and said, ‘You realise we’ve now been
out of the White House longer than we were in it.’”
No longer in exile, yet not exactly in the inner circle, Clinton is trying to
define his role and find his place in the age of Obama. He agreed to some
limits on his activities to satisfy the good-government advocates around
Obama, but he is still travelling the globe, pushing his favourite
philanthropic programmes, collecting six-figure cheques for speeches, dining
with foreign leaders, and in his own way speaking for America again.
Recently, he agreed to serve as the United Nations special envoy to Haiti.
At the same time, he is trying to respect a certain line with the new
administration. He sends memos occasionally to the national-security
adviser, Jim Jones. He talks to Vice- President Joe Biden maybe once a week,
and less frequently with former aides like Rahm Emanuel, Larry Summers and
Carol Browner, who all now hold high positions in Obama’s White House. But
he leaves Obama alone. When I visited Clinton at his office in Harlem in
April, he said he had talked to Obama only once since the inauguration and
could not recall what about. “I try to stay out of their way,” he told me.
“I’ve got plenty to do. I’ve got a full life here. If I come up
with an idea I think that’s helpful to them, I give it to them.”
He has easier access to the secretary of state, when he can get the phones to
work. “If she asks, I tell her what I think,” Clinton said. “If there’s
something going on that I feel I have a particular knowledge of, I say
that.” Does she ask? “Yeah, quite frequently,” he said. “She says, ‘Did you
ever work with this guy? Do you know him?’”
Nobody has combined the roles of former president and cabinet spouse before,
and the lines are blurry. So Clinton is doing his own thing. The
restrictions Obama imposed on Clinton’s activities — like disclosing his
foundation’s donors and no longer convening conferences overseas — have done
little to tether him to New York. At the World Economic Forum in Davos in
January, Clinton roamed the halls, mixing with the dignitaries as if it were
an Oxford reunion. After hosting a reception at a local museum on opening
night, he wandered over to the Sheraton to a private party held by Vladimir
Putin, the Russian prime minister, who welcomed him as “our good friend”.
The two then retired to a private room, planted themselves at a table and
talked deep into the night. When I asked Clinton what they discussed, he
lapsed into stories about Putin and his own love for Boris Yeltsin, but
divulged little of what was said. Even so, it seems reasonable to infer that
Putin was hoping to send messages to the new administration through the
husband of the secretary of state.
For both the trip to Davos and the trip to South America I joined, Clinton
said he checked first with Jim Jones at the National Security Council. “I
say, ‘Look, I’ve been invited to go to this place. These people will be
there. Do you want me not to go?’” he told me. “If they want me to make any
points on their behalf, I’ll do it. I really do believe there can only be
one president at a time.” A White House official later told me that Clinton
also checked with Jones before agreeing to take the United Nations post.
So far, the former president has avoided causing trouble for the new one.
Before Hillary was picked for secretary of state, some Obama advisers were
wary of bringing a freelancing Bill Clinton inside the tent. But, to their
surprise, Clinton has done nothing to complicate Obama’s life so far. As of
early May, Clinton had never been mentioned during the daily White House
senior staff meetings as an issue to be dealt with, according to two
officials who attend. By contrast, one of them said, Jimmy Carter had come
up twice already.
Clinton was in Hong Kong for a foundation event in December when Obama
nominated Hillary Clinton as secretary of state. As he watched the
announcement on a TV in a restaurant, he could not help voicing his own
running commentary. He shouldn’t have said that. He could have said this.
She should smile now. He was with Mack McLarty, a lifelong friend and his
first White House chief of staff, who nudged him. “Mr President,” he recalls
saying, “there are other people here.”
Clinton arrived at the inception of the new administration still burnt by the
campaign that produced it. His flashes of temper and ill- considered remarks
on the trail showed a side of him that surprised many accustomed to a smooth
political operator. He was riled that a young upstart who had never
accomplished much could overtake his wife, according to campaign veterans.
He chafed at efforts by her staff to control him and bristled when he felt
they were not listening to him. At one point he devoted days to campaigning
in South Carolina against the wishes of her strategists, only to watch her
lose the primary. “He never felt a part of the campaign and, in fact, he was
not part of the campaign,” an adviser to Hillary, who did not want to be
named, told me. In part, the strategist said, that was because the candidate
herself felt she had to win on her own. “She was keeping him distant.”
Now his anger appears gone, and he has entered the reconciliation stage of the
familiar Clinton cycle of fall and redemption. Two sides of Clinton’s
persona have long warred with each other: sunny optimism versus angry
grievance. Clinton succeeded in politics largely because he projected the
former; his worst moments usually came when he gave in to the latter. Both
sides are genuine reflections of who he is. Twelve years after his last
campaign for office, he found it harder to control his resentments when he
returned to the trail on his wife’s behalf. In his view, the media and the
political world held her to a different standard, while practically
anointing Obama. And when he says her, he also means, in the back of his
mind, himself.
By most accounts, including his own, Clinton was never the same after a
quadruple bypass heart operation in 2004, followed by rare complications
affecting his lungs that required another operation six months later. “Last
year, I was exhausted half the time,” he told me when we sat down recently
at his house in Chappaqua outside New York City. “I literally went to 300
towns in March, April and May alone. I did way over 300 events in those
three months. So, you know, you might be a little testy, too, if you didn’t
get more sleep than I did.”
When Clinton was in college at Georgetown, a professor mentioned that great
men often require less rest than ordinary people, some sleeping no more than
five hours a night. Clinton adopted that pattern. But the operations drained
his fabled stamina. “It changed me,” he said. “One of the things I noticed
is that on normal days since I had that heart surgery, I’m a lot more
laid-back and healthy. But I also noticed, and this is what you picked up in
the campaign, that if I’m really tired, it’s more difficult for me than it
was when I was back in politics before I had the heart problem. I have no
explanation for why that is. It’s neither an excuse for any mistake I made
or anything else. I’m just explaining. My life has changed.”
