Bill Clinton loves to shop. On a March day in an elegant crafts store in Lima, the Peruvian capital, he hunted for presents for his wife and the women on his staff back home. He had given a speech at a university earlier and just came from a ceremony kicking off a program to help impoverished Peruvians. Now he was eyeing a necklace with a green stone amulet.
Standing all by himself, the former president of the United States moved his eyes methodically across shelves of wooden carvings, jewelry and sculptures as he searched for something distinctive to bring his wife. “She used to look forward to me coming home from wherever I’ve been,” he mused with a laugh. “Now I’m afraid I’ll be second fiddle to whatever world leader she’s just met.”
Hillary Rodham Clinton, the secretary of state, had in fact just returned home from a trip to Mexico, then rushed to the White House to help announce a new war strategy. “I saw her on CNN standing behind the president talking about Afghanistan,” her husband said. “Then she went to Dallas for something. I don’t know why.”
He spotted a turquoise bracelet. “Hillary likes turquoise,” he noted as he fingered the piece.
He decided to buy it. In between his globe-trotting philanthropy, speech making and legacy burnishing, Clinton is a regular at crafts stores around the world and can tell you the best ones in Hong Kong or Arusha. “They’re a great thing,” he said. “If all of your staff are women and all of your family are women, you just buy what you like and bring them home and then figure out who to give them to.”
The store owner showed him a selection of shoulder bags for women. Clinton selected one he thought would be great for his friend, Frank Giustra, the Canadian mining mogul, to give to Giustra’s girlfriend. Clinton said he likes picking out gifts for his friends’ wives and girlfriends.
After a half-hour, he slipped back into his motorcade and headed to the Restaurant Huaca Pucllana, adjacent to pre-Incan ruins dating back 1,500 years. Clinton settled into a seat at a long table that included his traveling party: Giustra, a half-dozen aides, some local advance people and me.
He seemed a little tired, having flown overnight to Peru from New York before plunging into a full day of activities. More than eight years after leaving office and nearly five years after an open-heart operation, Clinton at 62 looks older than the boy president who dominated American politics in the 1990s, but he remains more robust than most men his age and full of intellectual energy. His left hand trembled a little bit during dinner, as it tends to do late in the day. It worried him enough at one point that he had himself tested for Parkinson’s disease, but the results came back negative; his doctor says he has just signed too many autographs over the years. When I mentioned that he had to get hearing aids during his White House tenure because of the effects of too many campaign rallies, he cheerfully pulled out the latest equipment from his ear and showed off how sleek and virtually invisible it was.
By the end of a three-day jaunt through Peru and Colombia to check up on programs sponsored by the William J. Clinton Foundation, I realized how familiar the trip felt — not because it resembled the travels he made as president but because it resembled the ones Hillary Clinton made as first lady. As a White House correspondent at the time, I accompanied her to Africa, Europe and Latin America. She typically would make a courtesy stop at a palace for a brief meeting with the head of state, but the trips were built around round-table discussions or visits to far-off villages to explore how people confronted the challenges of their world. That’s what Bill Clinton was doing now. The next day he would wake up in Lima, fly to Barranquilla on Colombia’s northern coast and then to Medellín before settling into a hotel in Cartagena. When I later made the observation to him, he said with a laugh, “We’ve reversed roles.”
One day during the trip, he was standing on an airport tarmac in Colombia, struggling with the mobile telephone pressed to his ear. “The only bad thing about Hillary’s being secretary of state,” he groused good-naturedly, “is I can’t always get hold of her. They changed all her phone numbers, and her phone doesn’t work inside the State Department building.”
Clinton has now spent more time as a former president than he did as president, a point he said he made to Hillary when they arrived home after President Barack Obama’s inauguration. “I looked at her and I said, ‘You realize we’ve now been out of the White House longer than we were in it.’ ”
The advent of a new Democratic administration, with his wife in the top cabinet slot, has opened a new chapter in the eventful life of the nation’s 42nd president. 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 traveling the globe, pushing his favorite philanthropic programs, collecting six-figure checks for speeches, dining with foreign leaders and in his own way speaking for America again. A couple of weeks ago, 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 with Vice President Joe Biden perhaps once a week and less frequently with former aides likeRahm 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 last month, he said he had talked with Obama only once since the inauguration and could not remember 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, at least when he can get the phones to work. “If she asks, I tell her what I think,” Clinton said. “And if there’s something that’s going on that I feel that I have a particular knowledge of, I say that.” Does she ask? “Yeah, quite frequently she does,” he said. “She says: ‘Did you ever work with this guy? Do you know him?’ ”
Hillary Clinton, who declined to comment for this article, recently told Mark Landler of The Times that her husband is careful to give her space but can be a useful source of information. “He just knows a lot and he knows everybody,” she said. “He has a broad-gauge understanding of issues and personalities, so he’s always value-added.”
No one has combined the roles of former president and cabinet spouse before, and the lines are blurry. After Hillary Clinton’s nomination for secretary of state was announced, the telephones at her husband’s office rang as various ambassadors tried to go through him to get a meeting. The foreign leaders he meets with now ask after his wife and know they can use him to get messages to her. But Obama has not tapped Clinton to do anything significant for the new administration yet. Unless Obama messes up, says a former top Clinton aide, “President Clinton is irrelevant.” Obama does not need him. “This is not a circumstance in which Bill Clinton is going to have much of a role,” the aide says.
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” and toasted him with vodka shots. The two then retired to a private room, planted themselves at a table and talked deep into the night.
When I asked Clinton later 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. On missile defense, Clinton said Putin told him, “Oh, we’re going to work it out now.” And Putin stressed that his handpicked successor as president, Dmitri Medvedev, was not just a puppet.
For both the trip to Davos and the trip to South America that 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 early last month. “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 Clinton 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.
“He left the country in a stronger position, and I think he’s pretty much at peace with what he accomplished,” Mack McLarty, a Clinton friend since kindergarten and his first White House chief of staff, told me. “That doesn’t mean that from time to time, President Clinton wouldn’t like to be engaged and be in the action. That’s an understandable human feeling. But it’s not burning him up or eating him up.”
Not long after our meeting in Harlem, Clinton was invited to join Obama for a ceremony enacting legislation to expand theAmeriCorps service program, one of the former president’s favorite legacies. By the time Clinton left office, more people had served in AmeriCorps than have served in the Peace Corps in its entire history. The ceremony was held at a school in a poorer, predominantly African-American section of Washington. Clinton was acknowledged in the remarks but was not invited onto the main stage or given a speaking role. Instead, Obama used the occasion to heap praise on Senator Edward Kennedy, a key patron during last year’s campaign.
Afterward, Clinton joined Obama in a motorcade ride to a nearby park to plant trees with members of a program financed by AmeriCorps. Clinton wore boots and gloves. Obama, in dress shoes, watched as his predecessor showed him how it was done, chopping at the dirt and making sure the hole was big enough for the roots to grow.
“Mr. President, I don’t think you can do any better than that,” Obama told him. The two walked up a path together as Clinton prepared to leave.
“Stay in touch,” said Obama, who went to plant his own tree. Rather than leave, Clinton grabbed a second tree and began planting that one too.
Clinton was in Hong Kong for a foundation event in December when Obama nominated Hillary Clinton for secretary of state. As Bill Clinton watched the announcement on a television 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. Mack McLarty, who was with him, nudged him. “Mr. President,” he recalls saying, “there are other people here.”
Clinton arrived at the inception of the new administration still burned 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 Clinton, who did not want to be named discussing internal dynamics, 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. “I think his blood pressure is down again,” McLarty said. And after an uncertain beginning, he added, Clinton has passed through “a fragile period” during the transition and reconciled himself to the new administration. “I think he’s better,” agreed Skip Rutherford, another longtime friend and dean of the Clinton School of Public Service at the University of Arkansas. “I think he’s happier.”
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 news 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 last month 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, but I was in 300 separate American communities. 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 heart and lung operations drained his fabled stamina. “It changed me,” he said. “One of the things I noticed is that on normal days ever since I had that heart surgery, I’m a lot more laid back and a lot more relaxed and a lot more healthy. But I also noticed since I had the surgery — and this is what you picked up in the campaign — that if I’m really, 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. I’m just observing it. It’s neither an excuse for any mistake I made or anything else. I’m just explaining. It’s something I’ve noticed. My life has changed.”
People close to Clinton said he has largely got over his resentment at Obama but not toward Ted Kennedy and his niece, Caroline Kennedy. As Clinton sees it, they say, he did so much for the Kennedys over the years that he felt they became almost family. Nor has he forgiven Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, who endorsed Obama even though Clinton appointed him to two cabinet posts. And the man once called the “first black president” remains deeply wounded by allegations that he made racially insensitive remarks during the campaign, like dismissing Obama’s South Carolina win by comparing it with Jesse Jackson’s victories there in the 1980s.
“None of them ever really took seriously the race rap,” he told me. “They knew it was politics. I had one minister in Texas in the general election come up and put his arm around me.” This was an Obama supporter. “And he came up, threw his arm around me and said, ‘You’ve got to forgive us for that race deal.’ He said, ‘That was out of line.’ But he said, ‘You know, we wanted to win real bad.’ And I said, ‘I got no problem with that.’ I said it’s fine; it’s O.K. And we laughed about it and we went on.” The other side is moving on, too. Representative James Clyburn of South Carolina, who once recalled an angry Clinton berating him on the phone for criticizing the former president’s campaign rhetoric, is letting bygones be bygones, at least publicly. “No fence-mending is needed,” Clyburn said through a spokeswoman.
Yet if Clinton has a powerful memory for slights, he also has a remarkable capacity for reconciliation. He is likelier to find peace with people who hate him the most than with friends who betray him. He focuses his considerable charms on seducing the person in the room he finds most resistant. Among those he has been friendly with lately is Christopher Ruddy, a conservative journalist who was a chief proponent of cover-up theories involving the Clintons during the 1990s. In his book, “The Strange Death of Vincent Foster,” Ruddy rejected official findings that Foster, a deputy White House counsel, killed himself in a Virginia park and suggested the possibility of “a cover-up conducted by people who have, with the help of the press, placed themselves above the law.” Ruddy also advanced the notion that Ron Brown, the Clinton commerce secretary who died in an airplane crash in Croatia in 1996, was actually shot in the head.
Ruddy today is the founder and chief executive of Newsmax, a conservative news-magazine. He told me he came around on Clinton after Ed Koch, the former New York mayor, introduced them. That led to lunches and more contacts, and now Ruddy says he was wrong about Clinton. “I do consider Bill Clinton a friend, and I think he would consider me a friend,” Ruddy said. “And to think of all the wars we went through in the ’90s, it seems almost surreal.”
With the passage of time, Ruddy said he came to believe that Clinton was much less liberal than his enemies thought. After all, Clinton overhauled welfare, tamed the deficit and promoted free trade. While still a proud “Reagan conservative,” Ruddy said he now thinks the attacks on Clinton in the 1990s went too far. “Did we like and enjoy all the salacious reporting and all the stuff going on in the ’90s?” he asked. “I guess we thought, This is just politics. But looking back at my role, I was probably over the top. And if I knew then what I know today, I wouldn’t have pursued some of that stuff as aggressively as I did. I did an honest reporter’s job. But I have a different take on it now.”
Ruddy also attributes his change of heart to Clinton’s foundation, which has impressed him and other onetime foes. Richard Mellon Scaife, the billionaire publisher who financed Ruddy’s investigations and other anti-Clinton activities, is now a contributor to the foundation. So is Rupert Murdoch, the News Corporation chairman whose Fox News was a regular thorn in Clinton’s side. Clinton over the years has also made peace with other former adversaries, like Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich. The elder George Bush told me he now considers Clinton “a real friend.” When I asked what changed his view, he wrote in an e-mail message: “I didn’t know him personally back then. I knew him, but not up close and personal. Now I do.”
Clinton’s relationship with the younger Bush evolved over the years. “President Bush the latter didn’t like me very much, because I defeated his father, and it was obvious to me when he came to the White House when I was president and he was governor of Texas,” Clinton recalled. “Jeb was a better actor.” The bad blood increased when Clinton left the White House and stories emerged about W’s being removed from computer keyboards and so forth, much of which proved to be exaggerated or untrue. The Bush crew bitterly complained that the Clinton team did little to help them; Clinton was bitter at the whisper campaign trashing him. “I had a talk with him about it one day, a real frank talk, because they were being rough,” Clinton told me. “I told him that I understood how he felt, and it didn’t bother me. I liked the fact that he loved his father and that I felt a great affection for his father, too. But I said: ‘I’ll tell you what, I’ll make you a deal. If you ever need me to do something for you and I can do it consistent with my conscience, I’ll do it.’ ”
Bush took him up on the offer by asking Clinton to work with his father on relief efforts after the Asian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina. “We just developed a relationship,” Clinton said. “He would call every now and then. We would talk. I just made it a project. I wanted to figure him out and get to know him.” Although they disagree on many issues, Clinton said: “I like him personally. I think he did what he thought was right.” By the time Bush left office, the two presidents were close enough that Clinton taped a funny testimonial alongside the elder Bush for a video shown on the plane as the 43rd president flew back to Texas after Obama’s inauguration. And Clinton and George W. Bush agreed to appear onstage together in Toronto on May 29 for a 90-minute discussion of current events.
“You know, I’m a Baptist,” Clinton explained. “We don’t give up on anybody. We believe in deathbed conversions.”
How about Ken Starr? “Well,” he said, then paused. “That’s another kettle of fish.”
History will always remember that Bill Clinton was the first elected president ever impeached, particularly because the charges were rooted in a tawdry Oval Office fling with a White House intern and fostered a divisive partisan showdown ending in his acquittal. But Clinton has not been willing to trust history to write his story.
When Clinton left office, he was lost at first. McLarty recalled being “a little concerned” for a while. But then the former president established a foundation with ambition to match his own. Financed by Saudi princes, Indian tycoons, Hollywood moguls and governments like Australia and Norway, Clinton has assembled an operation with 1,400 paid employees and volunteers working in 40 countries to fight disease, poverty and climate change. The foundation has made a place for itself as a generator of new ways of tackling old problems. Rather than just pour money into an issue, it searches for market-based solutions that bring together business, government and the nonprofit sector.
The claimed successes at times sound grandiose. The Clinton Global Initiative asserts that it has “affected more than 200 million lives in 150 countries” through $46 billion in commitments by its members. Whatever the details, the foundation’s work clearly has yielded tangible results, most notably in the fight against H.I.V./AIDS. By negotiating a volume contract with the pharmaceutical industry, the foundation cut the cost of anti-retroviral medicine by nearly half for the developing world; governments around the globe have bought drugs off the Clinton contract for about two million people living with the disease.
Clinton’s peripatetic journeys in South America showcased other initiatives. In Lima, he attended a ceremony kicking off a project to provide 50,000 cataract operations for the poor over four years. In Cartagena, wearing a hand-woven bracelet that he was given during a previous visit in 2002 and has never taken off, Clinton visited young women growing and selling spices thanks to help from the foundation.
His foundation works on the home front too. Shortly after returning from South America, I went to see him at the Empire State Building as the owners announced a “green” retrofit to cut energy consumption and save $4.4 million a year on utility bills. The project represented a Clinton-foundation approach to reduce the carbon footprint of large buildings across the world: building owners obtain financing from banks to renovate their properties by dedicating the savings from lower utility bills to repay the loans. Energy-services companies guarantee reductions in energy consumption to achieve those savings or provide the difference if they fall short. “We’ll never conquer climate change,” Clinton told the crowd on the 80th floor, “until we prove it’s good business to do so.”
Some friends think he is using his postpresidency to make up for what he could not achieve during his presidency. “He’s got a lot of unfinished business that he wants to do,” Skip Rutherford, of the Clinton School of Public Service, said. “I think he’s completing a lot of things he wished he could have done as president.” Bono, the rock star and activist, said he believes Clinton regrets in particular that he did not do more in office to fight AIDS overseas. “He did a lot on domestic AIDS, but I think he does beat himself up on not dealing with global AIDS quickly enough,” Bono told me. Since leaving office, he said, Clinton “not only got up to speed but got into the fast lane in fighting this epidemic.”
Clinton agrees, to a point. “Some of the things, yes, it’s unfinished business,” he told me. “That’s mostly the climate-change thing and, to some extent, AIDS. But AIDS was more like here’s something where I can still make a difference.” On climate change, he argued that he did what he could as president; he pushed for the Kyoto treaty curbing greenhouse gases but never sent it to the Senate because it would not be ratified. “Nobody was really focusing on climate change,” he said. “So a lot of times you have to wait for the time to get right.” When it came to AIDS, he added, “I felt that neither I nor anyone else in the world did enough. We tripled overseas AIDS funding when I was president, and we were contributing about 25 percent of the funding in the world, but it was a pitiful amount.”
Ultimately, at the suggestion of his longtime aide and right-hand man, Doug Band, he formed the Clinton Global Initiative in 2005 to gather heads of state, Nobel laureates, billionaires and celebrities for a conference to make specific commitments to fix the world’s problems, not just talk about them and forget them the next day. As Band put it, “Only one person alive could really get all these people together in one room — 60 or 70 heads of state, Bono, Gates and Buffett — and say, ‘You can’t leave the room until you make a commitment and put your name on the line.’ ”
A few weeks after Obama’s inauguration, Clinton joined Al Gore, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to talk about climate change at the Center for American Progress, the liberal research organization founded by his former White House chief of staff John Podesta. Moderating was Timothy Wirth, the former Colorado senator who served as an under secretary of state in Clinton’s administration. Wirth noted the recent momentum on climate change, then turned to his former president.
“Why did this take so long?” Wirth asked Clinton pointedly. Clinton looked a little peeved. “We didn’t have the votes before,” he explained.
Later in the program, Podesta returned to the subject. “I want to come back to the question you posed to President Clinton, which is what’s different than the last 35 years,” said Podesta, who most recently served as Obama’s transition chief. “And I’d say after this beginning, it’s that we have new leadership to move the issue forward.”
If the implicit comparison bothered Clinton, he did not say so. But the moment raised questions: What does Obama’s ascension mean for Clinton’s legacy? Is it the validation of the Clinton presidency or the repudiation of it? Is Obama building on the base Clinton established or tearing it down? Will Obama be the president many Democrats wished Clinton had been? Or will he be doomed to relearn the lessons Clinton did about ambitious agendas giving way to more incremental change?
In the past 140 years, only two other Democratic presidents, Harry Truman and Jimmy Carter, lived long enough to see another Democrat in the White House — and Carter’s relations with Clinton were difficult, to say the least. Clinton chooses to look at Obama as the next stage in a political movement he led. But it’s not at all clear that Obama sees it that way. During the campaign, Obama dismissed Clinton as a historical placeholder. “Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that, you know, Richard Nixon did not, and in a way that Bill Clinton did not,” Obama said then.
Of course, Obama was running against Clinton’s wife. Since winning, Obama has found more to like about the Clinton administration, particularly its personnel. His chief of staff, national economics adviser, climate czar, White House counsel, Treasury secretary, attorney general, United Nations ambassador and homeland-security secretary — not to mention his secretary of state — all served with Clinton. As of April, 42 percent of Obama’s appointees to Senate-confirmed positions were Clinton veterans.
Some of those returnees to power seem to view the Obama administration as a do-over, a chance to get right what went wrong in the 1990s. When they talk about what it is like to work for Obama, Clinton does not fare well in the comparison. That may be a function of the natural tendency to talk up the current boss, but in their praise of Obama comes the obvious contrast. They marvel at Obama’s discipline and roll their eyes as they remember Clinton’s agonizing before making decisions. They admire Obama’s cool as they recall Clinton’s “purple rages” at his staff behind closed doors. “Obama respects the process,” said an aide to both men. “Clinton always had to do the math himself.”
Rahm Emanuel, who was a senior adviser to Clinton and now is chief of staff for Obama, recently described the current White House as a far more cohesive operation than his last one. “We don’t, rather, have the kind of New Democrats versus traditionalist split that existed in that White House,” he said on CNBC. “We don’t have in this White House the president-versus-vice-president staff divisions that have been in other White Houses.” Emanuel credited “the tone and tenor that the president of the United States has set in expectations.” The next day on ABC, he suggested Obama would rank among the best American leaders, comparing him with “successful presidents and transformative presidents” like Franklin D. Roosevelt, Kennedy and Reagan. Emanuel made no mention of Clinton.
When I later asked him about that, Emanuel quickly heaped praise on Clinton. “When you do a balanced budget, welfare reform, a crime bill, successfully prosecute the war in the Balkans, pass the chemical-weapons treaty, NATO expansion, there is no way Bill Clinton was not a successful president,” he said. “He governed in a Republican era. I said ‘transformative president.’ ” Transformative presidents like Roosevelt, Kennedy and Reagan followed presidents who were perceived to have failed and who governed in a time of crisis, he said. The factors “that make up what would be a transformative president weren’t there for Clinton.”
While Emanuel points to history, some Democrats blame Clinton for being too tactical and hope that Obama will achieve what his predecessor failed to do in remaking health care and reining in climate change. “So why didn’t more happen?” Wirth asked, repeating his own question when I tracked him down after the forum on climate change. “That’s the first question that has to be looked at. It was not very high on their political list, and I think they were somewhat afraid of the issue politically.” Clinton was right that he did not have the votes, Wirth said. “But they didn’t try to get the votes,” he said. “When we were doing Kyoto, they weren’t really helpful in driving the issue at all, the White House. We were sort of hung out there on our own at the State Department. So we lost all those years.”
But if liberals see Obama as the bold Clinton, some moderates and conservatives worry that Obama is reversing his predecessor’s direction. Clinton sought to remake a broken party in a more centrist mold. Beyond balancing the budget for the first time in three decades and overhauling the welfare system, he passed the North American Free Trade Agreement and launched military strikes against Saddam Hussein and Slobodan Milosevic. Now the “era of big government” he declared over appears back, as Obama tries to jump-start the economy by pushing deficit spending to the highest levels since World War II and inserting government more deeply into the private sector than it has been in generations. Where Clinton failed to pass a $16 billion economic-stimulus package in 1993, Obama pushed a $787 billion stimulus package in 2009 through a more deferential Congress.
So if Obama transforms Washington, does that validate Clinton or marginalize him? “I think it eclipses him,” said a senior Clinton White House official. Podesta puts it differently, arguing that Obama may be able to accomplish more because Clinton paved the way for his administration. “It’s built on extending the strategy that Clinton brought to bear on government,” Podesta told me. “But it also has more opportunity for transformational change. If he’s able to succeed at that, and I believe he can, people 40 or 50 or 60 years from now will look back and say the roots of that were planted during the Clinton administration. But Clinton lived at the back end of a conservative cycle, and Obama is living at the front end of what could be a profoundly progressive cycle.”
The issue came up several times in my conversations with Clinton, and it was clear he was sorting through the shifting historical roles. “I see this moment as the triumph of a battle we’ve been waging for 40 years, and basically they were symbolized by, in effect, Reagan and Thatcher on one side and me and Blair on another,” he said. Now he detects a new era in which the Democratic base has grown and more things are possible, just as many of Theodore Roosevelt’s progressive designs were not realized until his cousin became president. “I see a lot of the ideas that I pushed — that I got enormous push-back for — now flowering,” he said.
One thing that thrived during Clinton’s presidency, the economy, has wilted of late. The economic boom of the 1990s created nearly 23 million new jobs during his eight years, but today, the economy is shedding hundreds of thousands of jobs a month. While this has stoked nostalgia for the prosperity of the Clinton era, it has also focused new scrutiny on his record. What role did Clinton’s policies play in creating the conditions that led to the Great Recession?
When the subject came up during our conversation in Chappaqua, Clinton calmly dissected the case against him and acknowledged that in at least some particulars his critics have a point. In almost clinical form, as if back at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, he broke down the case against him into three allegations: first, that he used the Community Reinvestment Act to force small banks into making loans to low-income depositors who were too risky. Second, that he signed the deregulatory Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in 1999, repealing part of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act that prohibited commercial banks from engaging in the investment business. And third, that he failed to regulate the complex financial instruments known as derivatives.
The first complaint Clinton rejects as “just a totally off-the-wall crazy argument” made by the “right wing,” noting that community banks have not had major problems. The second he gives some credence to, although he blames Bush for, in his view, neutering the Securities and Exchange Commission. “Letting banks take investment positions I don’t think had much to do with this meltdown,” he said. “And the more diversified institutions in general were better able to handle what happened. And again, if I had known that the S.E.C. would have taken a rain check, would I have done it? Probably not. But I wouldn’t have done anything. In other words, I would have tried to reverse everything if I had known we were going to have eight years where we would not have an S.E.C. for most of the time.”
Clinton argued that the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act set up a framework for overseeing the industry. “So I don’t think that’s such a good criticism,” he said. “I think, actually, if you want to make a criticism on that, it would be an indirect one — you could say that the signing of that legislation sped up what was happening anyway and maybe led some of these institutions to be bigger than they otherwise would have been and the very bigness of some of these groups caused some of this problem because the bigger something is and the newer it is, the harder it is to manage. And I do think there were some serious management problems which might not have occurred.”
Then there are the derivatives. There, Clinton pleads guilty. Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chairman, opposed regulation of derivatives as they came to the fore in the 1990s, and Clinton agreed. “They argued that nobody’s going to buy these derivatives, we’ll do it without transparency, they’ll get the information they need,” he recalled. “And it turned out to be just wrong; it just wasn’t true.” He said others share blame, including credit-rating agencies that underestimated the risk. But he accepts responsibility as well. “I very much wish now that I had demanded that we put derivatives under the jurisdiction of the Securities and Exchange Commission and that transparency rules had been observed and that we had done that. That I think is a legitimate criticism of what we didn’t do.” He added: “If you ask me to write the indictment, I’d say: ‘I wish Bill Clinton had said more about derivatives. The Republicans probably would have stopped him from doing it, but at least he should have sounded the alarm bell.’ ”
For all that, Clinton insisted he never would have let the housing bubble grow into the problem it became (never mind the high-technology bubble that burst on his watch) and would have stepped in if he were president to prevent the free fall. “When anybody asks me that,” he told me, “I ask them, I look at them and ask them: ‘Do you think this would have happened if we had been there? Look me in the face and say yes.’ I haven’t found any takers yet.”
On the cedar-shingled Dutch colonial in Chappaqua hangs a sign that says, “The Clintons, est. 1999.” It is a white house, if not the White House, the oldest part dating to 1895. The first floor, airy and bright, displays the artifacts of a lifetime in politics. As Clinton gave me the tour, each item came with a story. Pictures of Boris Yeltsin, Nelson Mandela, Helmut Kohl, Yitzhak Rabin and Pele the soccer star. An illustration of the White House with drawings of all the presidents (“there’s Fillmore,” Clinton noted). A 4,000-year-old Chinese funeral urn and a 700-year-old Vietnamese spear. A massive, century-old German cabinet he bought, more than 30 years ago, for $150 (Hillary Clinton calls it “the monster”). A sculpture made out of pieces of Ron Brown’s plane embedded in rock from the Croatian mountain into which his plane crashed.
Unlike most presidents, Clinton never had his own house to retreat to while in office, and he eagerly described how he flattened an outside slope, put in a new floor and opened up the glassed-in porch. “I love this place,” he told me. “I’ve worked hard on it.”
As he showed me around, it was striking just how much this was his house. The memorabilia was his. All the work done to the property was what “I” did rather than “we.” While Hillary Clinton returns from her travels to their house in Washington, he flies back to the little airport at White Plains just 15 minutes from Chappaqua. He watches “Mad Men,” “24” and “Damages.” The man who ushered in the Internet age still does not use a computer, much less a BlackBerry, but keeps up with blogs and sites like TheHuffington Post through clips printed out by aides.
The couple’s hyperbusy, often-separate lives intersect when schedules permit. “I try to go down there one night a week,” Clinton said. “She comes home Friday nights, stays Saturday night, goes back Sunday.” When she makes it to Chappaqua, they do little socializing. “Normally when she comes here,” he said, “she just wants to rest.” And while they talk regularly by telephone, they sometimes lose track of the other. Hillary Clinton told my colleague Mark Landler that she did not know Bill Clinton was doing the Empire State Building event until it was in the news.
They spend much of their lives on airplanes, hers provided by the Air Force, his usually by one of his wealthy friends. For the South America trip, Clinton traveled with Frank Giustra aboard his luxurious MD-87, complete with bedroom and shower, gold-plated bathroom fixtures, leather upholstered reclining seats, flat-panel TVs and original paintings on the cabin walls. The blankets are emblazoned “Giustra Air.” Traveling with him on this trip was Doug Band, 36, his aide of 14 years who spends more time with Clinton than any other person. Mort Engelberg, a Hollywood producer who made films like “Smokey and the Bandit” and has done volunteer advance work for Clinton for years, was there too.
Clinton’s life with the high-flying crowd and his postpresidential friendships with the rich, powerful and famous have drawn disapproval from some quarters, including former advisers who see it as unseemly. Some of his rich bachelor friends have not led celibate lives, and the associations have generated concern about his own activities, as detailed in a Vanity Fair article last year. His contacts also made Clinton a very rich man very quickly after leaving office. Saddled with $14 million in legal bills after his wars with Ken Starr, Clinton quickly amassed a fortune through speaking fees, book contracts and business deals. Periodically questions emerge about his financial dealings with the likes of Giustra or Ron Burkle, the supermarket tycoon.
Clinton has severed his financial ties with Burkle. But he continues to travel with Giustra, despite attention over a visit he and Giustra made a few years ago to Kazakhstan’s authoritarian president, Nursultan Nazarbayev. An article on the front page of The Times focused on whether Clinton’s presence helped Giustra get a lucrative uranium-mining deal, something that both adamantly deny. Just as problematic was Clinton’s endorsement of Nazarbayev’s bid to lead an international organization that monitors elections, despite Kazakhstan’s history of manipulated votes. Giustra, who committed $100 million to a sustainable-development initiative with Clinton, deeply resents the insinuations about their friendship. “Being called all these things by all these people who never met me — let’s just say this: I will never go into politics,” he told me in a van as we rode to inspect a project in Colombia. “That’s a contact sport. He accepts the world he lives in.”
Clinton slips effortlessly among his various worlds. After a talk at a United Nations forum about Asian tsunami relief, I found him backstage accompanied by the film director Martin Scorsese, with whom he had just had lunch. A few weeks earlier, Clinton participated in a panel discussion at his presidential library in Little Rock. The rarefied Clinton gave way to the down-home Clinton, describing how he felt when his friends left Washington (“I was lower than a snake’s belly”) and how he attended an annual “coon supper” as governor (“Until you have eaten barbecued ’coon, you have not lived”). He laughed until he was red in the face as Dale Bumpers, the former senator from Arkansas, recounted traveling together in a small plane that crash-landed. “He was telling some long yarn, and when we crashed, he just kept talking,” Bumpers related with a little Ozark embroidery. “The plane was upside down, and I said: ‘Bill, open the door! This damn thing’s going to catch on fire!’ ”
For a man slowed by health issues, Clinton still stays up late at night chewing cigars and playing Oh, Hell, a card game Steven Spielberg taught him in 2000, recruiting Giustra, Band and anyone else he can get to play. He obsessively works the Times crossword puzzle, enlisting others to figure out clues. After getting stuck one night on “big catch of 2003” (“Hussein”), he handed me the completed puzzle the next morning.
He remains a wonk of the first order, lamenting that the foundation located next to his library has “a better water-capture and recycled- materials ratio than I do.” During Obama’s transition, Podesta said the only time Clinton called him was to make specific suggestions on “greening” buildings. “Mr. President, I’m not really sweating the details on this,” Podesta told him. And yet Clinton is self-critical enough that after a presentation to the Inter-American Development Bank conference in Medellín, he asked four times if he did all right.
“It’s a restless engagement in the world,” said Eric Nonacs, who was the foreign-policy adviser to Clinton’s foundation and now does work for the Clinton Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative. “He’s the same guy who has a huge circle of friends and keeps in touch with all of them. He’s the same guy who wants to finish the crossword puzzle and will do it with everyone around him if he needs to.”
If there is part of him that secretly covets Obama’s job, he is burying it inside. “I like my life now,” he said. “I loved being president and it’s a good thing we had a constitutional limit or I’d have made the people take me out in a pine box, probably. But we had a constitutional limit and I knew that in the beginning. And so when I left, I had to go out and create another life. And I did it, and I love doing it.”
He no longer seems to need the crowds quite the way he used to. He still lights up at the attention of people on the street and happily shakes every hand that comes his way, but he does not seek them out as much. It was striking one night in Lima to watch him steer through a restaurant. In the old days, he would have worked every table and lingered to hear every story. On this night, he shook the hand of a waiter but did not break stride as he made his way to the table. Being noticed has become part of the job, rather than a craving to satisfy.
Still, as he boarded the plane in Medellín one night, he posed on the tarmac with the local security officers who had been guarding him, as he dutifully does at every stop. He seemed tired and not particularly interested, but he did not complain. Climbing the stairs to leave, though, he noticed some other officers. “Were you in the picture?” he asked. Then to an aide, he said, “These guys weren’t in the picture.” He came back down the stairs and posed again.
Peter Baker, a White House correspondent for The Times and a contributing writer for the magazine, last wrote about the frustrations of a retiring Republican congressman.
