When Tony Blair was getting ready to leave No 10, he asked Bill Clinton for
advice. Neither of them had been defeated and they were both out of power as
relatively young men in their mid-fifties. What should he do, Blair
wondered.
“I told him there was no set formula,” Clinton said. “But if I were you, I’d
organise a foundation and I’d do what you found rewarding and cared
passionately about when you were in office. Life is too short, but you’re
going to have so much fun and you can really love your wife.”
That is precisely what Clinton did. “I sat down and made a list of all the
things I cared about when I was president.”
Some, he found, he could still have an impact on. Others, such as the Middle
East peace process, not so much. As for really loving his wife, Clinton, in
his own inimitable way, is doing that too. He beams at the thought that one
day his wife could be president, and he could be back in the White House as
“first laddie”.
We are talking in the cafeteria of the Harlem Children’s Zone in New York,
where he fetches me a Diet Coke. It is one of those little gallantries that
have served him so well in his political career and sealed his reputation as
a charmer.
Clinton has just been addressing an audience about Giving, the title of his
new book. He was in his element, surrounded by a diverse crowd of
philanthropists, big and small. Clinton told them that giving made people
“feel happier about themselves and their lives”.
He recalled being in Cambodia, in a hospital for Aids orphans founded by two
New York brothers, where he held in his arms a beautiful, healthy baby who
had at one point been certain to die. “Apart from that, only something
affecting my own family could make me that happy,” he said feelingly.
Since leaving office in 2000, Clinton has found his niche and successfully
pulled off the transition from president to ex. He has raised money with the
first President Bush for the victims of the tsunami and Hurricane Katrina in
New Orleans and squeezed time and cash out of tycoons and Hollywood stars
for good causes as part of his Clinton Global Initiative.
In his book, he spends as much time describing the little gifts of big-hearted
people, such as Oseola McCarty, a washerwoman who gave $150,000 in a trust
to endow a scholarship fund for African-American students, as he does on
big-money donors. “The small things are important to me because I want
people to say, ‘At least I can do this’,” he says.
With his silver hair and trim physique – the result of lots of golf and
careful attention to diet after a quadruple heart bypass operation –
Clinton, 61, positively glows these days. He is hoarse from campaigning with
Hillary in New Hampshire, and says he will be joining her more and more on
the trail “if I’m asked”. He is satisfied that he is an asset, not a
liability, to her, but is careful not to overdo the idea of a “two for one”
presidency. Hillary’s presidential high hopes are a great bonus for Bill,
since they give him the air of a man of the future, as well as the past.
“I’m still sort of in politics because Hillary’s in politics but I’m glad
it’s her instead of me,” he said on The Oprah Winfrey Show last week.
“Sometimes I get a call from around the country saying, ‘You realise I’m 15
years older than you were when you did this?’ And I say, ‘Well, nobody made
you run, girl’.”
Blair’s political afterlife is unlikely to be quite so merry. As we know, the
former prime minister followed his own counsel and took on the tough task of
special envoy to the Middle East. “He didn’t take my advice in one respect,”
Clinton tells me. “I told him he ought to take about six months off and he
jumped right into this Middle East thing.”
Blair did not really have a choice, Clinton grants. “Once he was asked to do
it, he had to. It is a job to die for . . .” Not literally, let’s hope.
If Hillary wins the 2008 White House race, the two former leaders could well
bump into each other on the diplomatic circuit. She has promised to appoint
Bill as ambassador-at-large, getting him on a plane – and out from under her
feet – on a mission to restore America’s reputation abroad.
Clinton is paying close attention to the political cross-dressing that
Nico-las Sarkozy, the right-wing French president, has made so fashionable
by appointing socialists to his cabinet. Gordon Brown is already emulating
it, luring various Tories and Lib Dems to sit on government committees – the
big tent is one that Hillary, too, would like to copy. She said last week
that she wanted some Republicans to accompany Bill on his travels and,
Clinton hints, may well appoint one or two to her administration.
“I think Sarkozy did a smart thing,” he tells me. “I was the first president
since Franklin Delano Roosevelt to have a defence secretary from another
party in my government in my second term.”
It didn’t stop the bitter assaults on his presidency in the 1990s. “Politics
in America was becoming an exercise in anger management,” he says.
“I hope we’re coming to the end of the era of the right-wing ideologues and
the politics of personal destruction. We’ll see.”
His theory, he reckons, will be tested in the 2008 election. “They [the right]
won’t quit doing it until they know it doesn’t work.” Hillary, he insists,
is not the divisive character demonised by her opponents and regarded as
unelectable, even by some Democrats.
“The problem in American politics is you become divisive if people dump on you
enough,” he says, “but the good thing about every election is that, if you
are nominated, the voters will always take a fresh look at you. I don’t
worry about it. Even now in the national polls, she runs the best against
Republicans.”
Clinton says Hillary “wears well”. He has a point. She is battle-scarred from
her years as first lady, where she was frequently attacked more viciously
than he was, yet has emerged respected, if not loved, and has even had the
Washington press corps in a tizzy about her cleavage. If she still engenders
some hatred, it is because she is a “strong woman”, he believes, who “took a
lot of hits with me”.
Funnily enough, Clinton uses the same phrase about Brown. He wears well. “He
is totally different from Tony and may be not conventionally as charismatic
but the thing about politics is that what people really look for is
authenticity,” Clinton says. “If you wear well, and are perceived to be
competent on the public’s side, that has its own charisma and you get a
little juice and rise out of it.”
He chuckles: “I think Gordon’s getting a little rise out of being who he is. I
think it’s great. I have a very high regard for him. He was an unbelieva-bly
good chancellor of the exchequer and he’s off to a great start.”
Clinton says he is “not surprised” by Brown’s success and reminds me that he
met him before Blair when he was still governor of Arkansas and Labour was
stuck in perpetual opposition nearly two decades ago.
They were at the Bilderberg conference in Baden-Baden, where heads of state
mingle with tycoons, policy wonks and up-and-coming politicians, and stayed
up half the night talking about politics.
Because Clinton and Blair were so close – until Bush came along to be Tony’s
new best friend which rather cooled things – it is easy to forget that
Clinton, the original “new Democrat”, is in some ways Blair and Brown in
one: both charmer and wonk. In his role as first laddie, should it come off,
he wants to ask some big questions.
There is a practical reason for bipar-tisanship, he says. “We are now clearly
in a global, interdependent world. What does it mean to have a national
identity? What does it mean that in Britain that guy tried to set off that
car bomb in Glasgow? Why did he feel that he didn’t belong?
“These are different from the cold war, industrial society questions,” he
adds. “I don’t think any political party that I’m aware of in the world has
successfully thought through this agenda for the mid21st century. It may
make a lot of sense to have bipartisan or multi-party governments if it
becomes a means for everyone to jump off a cliff together holding hands into
positive change.”
Clinton thinks Hillary would get him working together with the second
President Bush, after his term in office expires, despite their chequered
past.
“Oh yeah,” he says. “I’ve developed a very good relationship with him
personally. He was quite mean to me when I left office but I told him,
‘Look, I don’t mind you being mad at me. I beat your father and I’m glad you
love your father. But if you need me to do something for the country . . . I
will’.”
I think Clinton is referring to Bush’s pledge to restore, ahem, “dignity” to
the Oval Office when he was first elected, but after the September 11
attacks and the Iraq war, the world is generally too troubled to spend time
reexamining the entrails of the Monica Lewinsky scandal (although Radio 4
had a rather riveting go last week, it seems a long time since Bill said “I
did not have sexual relations with that woman” – like a line from a movie
long ago). Luckily for Hillary, most Americans have moved on.
Iraq, on the other hand, has driven huge rifts between old allies – first
distancing Clinton from Blair and now seemingly distancing Brown from Bush.
Clinton thinks American criticism over Britain’s drawdown from Iraq is
unfair.
“We’ll get over it. There will be no long-term damage to the US-British
relationship. Our common interests are too great,” he says.
“The United States can hardly ask any more of the British. Tony Blair and his
government played a terrific price in public support at home over the Iraq
project. Gordon Brown has to do what he believes is the right thing and in
Britain’s interest.”
He wishes Blair the best of luck in his new job. “Somebody from the West needs
to be over there stirring around all the time.” But, he says, “The problem
with a job like that is if you have more than one boss. You have to get
square on what the definition of the job is.”
Clinton will have to write his own job description should he become the first
first gentleman in American history. Until then he seems content to play the
cheerleader in chief. But there will be no doubt who will be boss this time
around.
It will be Hillary.
Power couple
1974 The pair meet in a library in Arkansas. “If you’re going to keep
looking at me, we might as well be introduced,” says Hill.
1975 Bill buys a house. “Well,” he says, “I’ve bought it now, so you’d
better marry me because I can’t live in it by myself.”
1992 Gennifer Flowers claims a 12-year affair with Bill. Hill says:
“I’m not sitting here as some little woman standing by my man like Tammy
Wynette. I’m sitting here because I love him.”
1998 Newspapers claim Bill has had an affair with Monica Lewinsky. Bill
says: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” He then claims oral
sex doesn’t count. Bill is impeached but acquitted.
Hill on Bill He’s a hard dog to keep on the porch.
Bill on Hill I have never known a person with a stronger sense of right
and wrong in my life – ever.
