by Nick Bryant
Used to so much pampering, certain members of the White House press corps were prone to self-centredness. On a four-hour coach trip from Orly Airport in Paris to the Normandy beaches – ‘Why couldn’t we have flown?’ – some complained of bad ‘butt wear’, which overlooked the meaning of the event we had travelled there to cover, a commemoration marking D-Day. Other correspondents, however, were a complete joy. By far my favourite was Mark Knoller of CBS News, a bearded radio correspondent who was a doppelganger for Pavarotti and had a voice that was arguably more thunderous.
As well as pumping out hourly radio dispatches that boomed off the walls of the filing centres like explosions in a quarry – the most startling thing I ever heard during a presidential trip was New York coming across the line to ask Knoller to refile, this time with further volume – he was a total White House trivia-hound, a fastidious gatherer of presidential facts, which he generously shared with colleagues. How many trips had the president taken? How many days had he spent on vacation? How many times had he used a teleprompter? How many times had he played golf, or, more recently, basketball? How many times had the president deployed the phrase ‘I will not rest until …’? Long before Google or NexisLexis, Knoller had all the answers, having compiled all the data himself in his soundproof cubbyhole in the basement below the White House briefing room.
If this bearded wonder could be faulted in any way at all, it was for a slight hesitation on words that began with ‘p’, which had unfortunate occupational drawbacks, especially on trips to Russia in President Putin’s day. If I were to be picky, he also overused the clatter of bongo drums as his opening sound effect in reports filed on one of Clinton’s trips to Africa.
For all his foibles, Knoller remained one of the White House’s greatest treasures – almost on a par with the Lincoln bed or Abigail Adams’s silver-plated coffee urn.
Other Washington fixtures were far less appealing. I confess to never becoming a great fan of the bulk of the Beltway’s pundocracy, a bunch of talking heads happy to pontificate whatever the subject, whatever the time of day, in a round-the-clock gush of uninformed verbiage. Here, being plugged into so many worldwide stories simultaneously was both Washington’s greatest strength and its greatest weakness.
So many pundits with so little knowledge were expected to pass judgement on so many global issues with so little time to prepare. The cable networks, with the exception of certain programs on CNN, favoured pundits who spoke simply, loudly, ideologically, passionately and, best of all, ill-temperedly. Unfortunately, this meant that the voices of some of the finest brains in Washington, who could bring not only expertise but also nuance to studio discussions, regularly got ignored. Over the years, my general rule of thumb came to be that the more you saw a pundit the less you needed to listen. For some, their main qualification appeared to be that they lived within a short cab ride of a cable news studio and, thus, a live hook-up with New York. They were little more than dial-an-opinion postcode pundits.
The marvellous exception was the great Christopher Hitchens. Not only was he one of the few commentators to bother visiting the countries he pontificated about, but he could also speak with enviable erudition. His mind was like a literary and historical archive from which he could retrieve material in an instant. What made his contributions all the more remarkable was that whenever I met him I was sure he was pissed – or, if not, well on his way.
The author of a savage polemic on Bill Clinton, No One Left To Lie To, he was used a lot by the BBC during impeachment, and when he came to the studio a strong aroma of white wine or Johnnie Walker Black Label whisky usually paved the way. When the on-air light in the studio turned to lustrous red, however, Hitchens was a marvel, delivering soundbites as delicately crafted as sonnets.
Such was his output and vast accumulation of knowledge, I was actually convinced for a time that there were three Christopher Hitchenses: one who did the speaking and writing, one who did all the required reading, and one who did the drinking. During those Washington years, I was writing my book on Kennedy and the civil-rights movement, and Hitchens very kindly gave it a generous review in his books column in the Atlantic Monthly. What quickly became evident from his depth of knowledge was that he had read not only my book but also most of its bibliography.
There were other things about Washington for which I did not much care. People living inside the Beltway had a vastly bloated view of their own importance and succumbed to an ‘inside the Beltway’ feeling of separateness and superiority. I know this to be true because I felt it very powerfully myself. ‘Washington feels like a conspiracy we’re all in together,’ wrote Henry Allen, a long-time resident and scribe for The Washington Post, ‘and nobody else in America quite understands.’
For all that, I absolutely adored the place, and I woke up each morning thinking there was no better place to be a correspondent. I loved its urgent pace, its obsession with politics, intrigue and palace gossip. A complete sucker for the majestic trappings of the modern presidency, I went all adolescent at the sight of a motorcade, was stirred by the thumping beat of ‘Hail to the Chief’ and felt a slight frisson whenever Marine One flew over the top of my Georgetown terrace on its way to Camp David.
Though I never got to fly on Air Force One, I hardly slept when I found myself catching a lift late one night on the back-up plane painted in the same livery on a red-eye flight from Dar es Salaam to Cairo. Truth be told, it was not much more comfortable than routine economy, but there was a certain pleasure in having drinks served on napkins with the presidential seal by air stewardesses who you sensed could probably break you in two with a couple of flicks of their beautifully manicured nails.
Back in Washington, I adored the monumentalism of the architecture and L’Enfant’s grand layout. Many an evening I would saunter down to The Mall, sit on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and imagine what it must have been like that sultry August afternoon in 1963 when a young preacher from Alabama cast aside his prepared remarks at the pleading of the singer Mahalia Jackson, who shouted, ‘Tell them about the dream, Martin,’ and launched into a rhetorical riff that became the crowning moment of the non-violent struggle. Peering down The Mall, past the shimmering spire of the Washington Monument to the US Capitol in the hazy distance, there were even times when I thought I could almost hear the stirring music of The West Wing building to a crescendo in the background.
Having fought so unrelentingly to remain its occupant, Bill Clinton’s departure from the White House almost inevitably descended into an orgy of self-indulgence, self-justification and self-congratulation. (His one-time rival Bob Dole had joked it might take a SWAT team to evict him on inauguration day.)
His valedictory vanity tour began with his farewell speech at the 2000 Democratic convention in Los Angeles, an appearance preceded by an elongated solo walk-on, where he stalked vast tracts of backstage corridors at the Staples Centre as delegates tracked his progress on giant screens, like athletics fans awaiting the arrival into the stadium of the winner in the marathon.
Taking presidential showboating to new highs, it was the kind of entrance that would have made even the promoters of a Las Vegas world-title bout blush with embarrassment. In saluting the American people, ‘who do the work, raise the kids, dream the dreams’, he was essentially saluting himself for delivering what he claimed were new heights of prosperity, progress and peace. Almost pleading for a legacy, he was desperate that his presidency should be remembered for something other than cigars, interns and, more unfairly, macadamia nuts.
The tour continued with a return visit to Dover, New Hampshire, a personal landmark on his road to the White House, since it was there, in the darkest days of the 1992 primary, that he vowed to stick with the people ‘until the last dog dies’. Now recalling one of his most folkloric quotes, I watched him tell an admiring crowd ‘the last dog is still barking’. Sure enough, he continued yapping away, like a puppy desperate for attention, on inauguration day itself, 21 January 2001.
By the twilight of Clinton’s presidency, it had become fashionable to talk of a Saturday-night Bill, inside which demons ran amok, and a Sunday-morning Bill, where his good angels reasserted themselves. It was the junk-food-guzzling, intern-squiring narcissist as opposed to the brilliant policy wonk, political strategist and communicator. In his rendering of Bill Clinton as Governor Jack Stanton in Primary Colors, Joe Klein captured the bad Bill more completely than any other author, just as his short biography, The Natural, summed up the frustrations of many one-time admirers angered that Clinton had self-sabotaged his presidency. ‘A surplus of libido and a deficit of integrity’ was Klein’s snappy take.
Yet perhaps the most wistful appraisal came from Robert Reich, Clinton’s former Labor secretary, who had first met him on a liner mid-Atlantic when they voyaged together as Rhodes Scholars to Oxford. ‘On Mondays and Wednesdays and Fridays I say, “Thank God Bill Clinton was there,” you know, to hold back the right-wing Republican tide, to preserve things that we believed in,’ Reich reflected. ‘And then on Tuesdays and Thursdays and Saturdays I say to myself, “What a waste. All that talent and all that ability, and he did not do what he intended to do and get accomplished. Maybe if he had been more disciplined, both in terms of his agenda, and also his personal life, more could have been done.”’ Then came the kicker. ‘And then on Sundays I don’t think about it.’
Alas, I could not claim Sunday as a Clinton day of rest. By strange coincidence, I happened to attend the same Methodist church, The Foundry, on Sixteenth Street, a few blocks up from the White House and just around the corner from the basement apartment that provided my first digs in Washington. Though I had no idea this was the First Couple’s place of worship when I started attending, there was a voyeuristic fascination in sharing pews with the Clintons, even if it meant that the throne of grace was only accessible through airport-style metal detectors. Church became much more fun when there was the possibility of exchanging the peace with a Secret Service agent packing a semi-automatic machine gun. For years, I also suspected the lead bass in the choir was on the government payroll; perhaps the well-built head soprano as well. Throughout the impeachment crisis, it made for compelling Clinton-watching, and I was surprised that not more journalists had latched onto it.
A few weeks before he left office, as he attended The Foundry for the last time as president, Clinton even had the front to deliver the sermon, the unexpected announcement of which in the morning’s order of service had me scrambling madly around for a pen and scraps of paper on which to transcribe. In full ‘Sunday morning Bill’ mode, Clinton was quite brilliant, the best I had seen him in years. He quoted John Quincy Adams: ‘There is nothing quite so pathetic in life as an ex-president.’ He bemoaned how his new-found reliance on commercial air travel would be a major test of his Christian bearing and confessed that he might well find it disorientating for a while to walk into a room without a band striking up ‘Hail to the Chief’.
His sermon included an oblique reference to the Monica Lewinsky scandal – ‘the storm and the sunshine of the last eight years’, as he put it – and a brief rumination on the poison that had polluted Washington, which produced another allusion to impeachment: ‘I have spent a lot of time, as you might have noticed, in a reasonably combative arena. I am not without competitive instincts. A lot of days, just showing up was an act of competition.’
He acknowledged the spiritual support of The Foundry’s minister, the Reverend J. Philip Wogaman, who met Clinton for weekly one-on-one sessions, and who once described the president to me, with a wry smile and delightful ecclesiastical understatement, as ‘a work in progress’.
Then, as he looked to the future, the self-styled architect of the ‘bridge to the twenty-first century’ did the vision thing anew. He described a world of greatly enhanced global interdependence, of new opportunities to relate to people across national, cultural and religious lines and of the breathtaking advances in biomedical sciences, which had the potential to dramatically lengthen and improve lives. Foreshadowing the mood of paranoia that followed 9/11, he warned that the biggest threat to humankind would be ‘the fear of the other’. Finally, he thanked his fellow parishioners ‘for your constant reminder in ways large and small that though we have all fallen short of the glory, we are all redeemed by faith in a loving God’.
Afterwards, as members of the congregation filed past the Clintons and performed various genuflections, I thrust out my own hand and thanked him for his work in Northern Ireland. (It would have been churlish in the circumstances to bring up Bosnia or Rwanda, I hope you will agree.) Clinton gave a slow, knowing nod and even managed to convey the sense that I had somehow managed to move him. No longer in need of votes, now he was in search of a legacy. As he gripped my hand, he gave me the distinct feeling of being the most important complimenter in the room.
Just as Afghanistan conjured up adventure and romance for the boots wing of the foreign-correspondent corps, New Hampshire fired the imaginations of those who ploughed their trade in suits. For a White House correspondent especially, confined for years on end inside the presidential bubble, nothing was more professionally invigorating than being allowed out on the campaign trail on quadrennial political furlough.
The reporting life at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was nothing if not eventful – for three years out of every four, there were few better datelines than the White House – but the road that led there was more beguiling. In the theme park of Afghanistan, correspondents had to criss-cross the country to find the warlords, poppy fields or Taliban. In New Hampshire, everywhere was Candidateland: diners, truck-stops, ski-fields, high schools, hotdog stands, veterans’ halls, white clapboard churches, college campuses and even the frozen lakes that were dotted in the winter months with bobhouses, the ice-fishing huts beloved of New Hampshirites.
If one rose early before breakfast, it was usually possible to have filmed most of the major candidates by lunch: schmoozing a pot-bellied trucker, conducting a high-school band, gladhanding a postman, tobogganing down an icy hill, listening empathetically to a voter, or consuming a plate of bacon and eggs, sunny side up, then making sure to leave an over-generous tip.
Rather than The New York Times or The Washington Post, The New Hampshire Union Leader and The Telegraph of Nashua were the papers of record. The Wayfarer Inn in Bedford, nestled close to a covered wooden bridge and configured around a millpond, was the place to stay. Television producers especially loved its man-made waterfall, a perfect, if counterfeit, New England backdrop for live crosses to the studio in New York or Atlanta. Correspondents would stand before it, talking about how New Hampshirites liked authenticity in their candidates and how easily they could spot a fake.
The state’s most famous water feature was overlooked by its most famous watering hole. Here, in the Wayfarer bar, reporters conducted much of their news-gathering, usually with a whisky or beer on the bar in front of them and, ideally, a loose-lipped campaign aide at their side. When finally he hung up his notepad, one legendary campaign reporter, the great Jack Germond of The Baltimore Sun, even had his bar stool officially retired.
Though Iowa could boast the first caucus of election season, it was New Hampshire, with the country’s first fully fledged primary, which could make or break candidates – presidents, as well, as Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson could both attest. Most of us had read the history, and virtually all of us were familiar with the reportage of Hunter S. Thompson, who had brought his gonzo journalism to
New Hampshire in 1972 and found himself shooting the breeze with Richard M. Nixon and peeing in a urinal alongside George McGovern.
Lavatorial or otherwise, all of us craved the same intimacy, which only New Hampshire could deliver. And anomalous though it was to grant such an insignificant state such inordinate power – New Hampshire has a population the size of San Antonio, Texas, a demographic that is 97 per cent white and a cranky, contrarian streak summed up by its famed number-plate motto ‘Live Free or Die’ – none of us asked too many questions for we were all having too much fun. This was the Kentucky Derby of American politics, and everyone wanted to be in the paddock for an initial look at the runners.
The first election of the new millennium had promise. Not since the end of the Reagan era had the presidential nominations of both parties been up for grabs, and New Hampshire had attracted a compelling assortment of characters. On the Democratic side, Vice President Al Gore was several characters all in one, an angst-ridden candidate so unsure of himself that he even took advice on what shade of clothing he should wear. ‘Earth colours’ recommended his unofficial adviser, the author Naomi Wolf.
Up against Gore was the former New Jersey senator Bill Bradley, a basketball star with the charisma of a chartered accountant, whom reporters lent a more dramatic persona in order to enliven their own lives as much as his. For a time, it looked as if the movie star Warren Beatty might also enter the race, which was the cause of much merriment. No candidate had ever promised such skeletal riches – Cher, Mary Tyler Moore, Joan Collins, Julie Christie, Natalie Wood, Diane Keaton and even Madonna – though his journey to the White House never progressed much further than the driveway of his Beverly Hills home. At least the speculation allowed us to perform one of the great rituals of any presidential campaign: to talk up a frivolous celebrity candidate – a position filled nowadays by Donald Trump.
