Gingrich goes so far as to leave open the possibility that Hillary Clinton might be a good president. “Who knows?” he responds, when I ask him that question. “Compared to what? She would be a methodical, an intelligent, an extraordinarily experienced, very tough-minded liberal. She would be marginally more conservative than Obama. And dramatically more liberal than any Republican. That’s who she is. That’s who she’s been for her whole life.” He also suggests that she would be an effective president. “I mean partly because she just knows so much, she’s been around so long, she’s done so many favors. She would be instinctively more bipartisan than Obama because she’s been here so long.”
As a U.S. senator from Texas, Phil Gramm was one of the Clinton administration’s most vigorous opponents. The staunch conservative almost single-handedly halted Hillary Clinton’s health-care reform plan by vowing it would pass the Senate over “my cold, dead political body.”9 He excoriated Bill Clinton over his various scandals and voted without reservation for his impeachment. In fact, Gramm was ranked by his former colleagues as one of the most enthusiastic and effective antagonists the Clinton administration had ever known.
But that was then. Now Phil Gramm is all smiles when it comes to the Clintons. Labeling the former president “a great communicator” on par with Ronald Reagan, Gramm says, “I think he is a people person. I think he’s capable of having warm feelings toward people that don’t necessarily agree with him.” In our interview, the former senator gushes, “I always was impressed by how prepared he was, how quick he was.”
What accounts for the change of attitude? Bill Clinton has spent years working his former political enemies by using what he uses best—ingratiation and flattery. He knows well the benefits that come from small, cost-free gestures. Gramm is a Clinton fan for life, apparently, and for one primary reason: “Any time we are on a program together or if he sees me in the audience,” Gramm, who now works in finance in New York City, tells me, “[Clinton] goes out of his way to say nice things about me.”
Clinton has also maintained a close and personal relationship with Trent Lott, the former senator and Senate majority leader from Mississippi. “He and I still talk,” Lott admitted a few years ago at a public Hudson Union Society event. “You know, when he had a heart attack, I really got worried about it. I was afraid he was going to kill himself. I called him and told him so.”
Lott continued, “You know, I had my little disaster—I was talking before I put my mind in gear one time and I wound up having to leave the majority leader’s position. Unceremoniously, you know, a lot of my friends—including the president at the time, George Bush—pulled the rug out from under me. But it was a rug that I should have had pulled out from under me. But I didn’t go away and pout and sulk about it, I stayed. I hung in there and kept doing my job, I kept doing my job, and four years later, back in the leadership. Again as majority whip. And what was one of the first calls I got? Bill Clinton. He said, ‘Well, I guess I’m going to have to give you my moniker as the Comeback Kid.’ ”
Lott’s comments that got him in trouble—the ones that didn’t seem to hurt his relationship with President Clinton—were about his support for Strom Thurmond, the Democratic senator from South Carolina who had run for president in 1948 on a “Dixiecrat” segregationist platform. “When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over the years, either,” Lott said. It would result in his fall from Senate leadership.
Lott’s audience laughed at the anecdote of Clinton calling him the “Comeback Kid.”10 And then he launched into only a semi-defense of impeachment, saying that the votes were “never there” to remove Clinton from office, suggesting his role was only to marshal the will of people but without getting too hostile and too acrimonious.
“I thought we got through it pretty well,” he said. “And I talked to Bill Clinton, not much during the proceedings, of course, but as soon as they were over,” he says, shrugging his shoulders, “we went right back to work. And did some more things for our country.”
A similar tone is offered by Mike Huckabee, who, as governor of Arkansas, worked frequently with Clinton during his presidency. “Clinton was extraordinarily attentive to governors in general, and to me in particular, and if I were to call and request a conversation with him about something, I’d generally get a call back within half an hour,” Huckabee tells me in an interview. “You couldn’t get that kind of attention from the Bush White House.”
Huckabee, like Gramm, was susceptible to Clinton’s small gestures. He tells me of a visit that he and his wife made to Toronto. Mrs. Huckabee noticed that Bill Clinton was in town for a book signing and suggested that they go and see him. “Well, of course, there was a huge line and they said no photos, you can’t say anything, just get your book signed and move on,” Huckabee says. “So she just got in the line, went through, and when he saw her he looked up and stood up from his seat and said, ‘Janet, what are you doing here?’ Well, it disrupted the whole thing and he gave her a big hug and they talked a minute. You could tell that all the people looking were just aghast, you know, ‘Who is this person who’s disrupting the whole thing?’ I’m sure they’d have a fit to find out it was the wife of a Republican governor, but that’s Bill Clinton. That’s just who he is.”
As with Hillary, the men who led the effort to impeach Clinton weren’t off-limits, either. Clinton has exchanged warm letters with Jim Rogan, the former impeachment manager. In our conversation, Rogan declined to release the letters, but acknowledged that “[w]e’ve corresponded back and forth over the years. It’s been very friendly.”
“Did he ever try to win me over?” Asa Hutchinson asks. “Every time we met. I mean that was the level of his engagement. He was always trying to make those connections and he generally did.”
“President Clinton tends to hold you in a man grip that’s just a little too close for comfort and he doesn’t let go,” Utah Republican congressman Jason Chaffetz says with a laugh. He met the former president at a wedding reception for Huma Abedin and Anthony Weiner. (The event was hosted at the Clintons’ Washington residence.)
“I think the thing that I admire really about President Clinton is he’s mature enough not to hold against somebody like Ray LaHood,” says LaHood in an interview for this book. LaHood, a Republican congressman from Illinois who later served as Obama’s secretary of transportation, noted that he voted for four articles of impeachment while in the U.S. House. “It would be very easy for [Bill Clinton] to turn and have a cold shoulder toward me as a Republican who served during the time of his impeachment. He’s a mature enough individual that we had a good relationship.”
Clinton has even gone so far as to entertain a reconciliation of sorts with the chief bogeyman of the Clinton years, at least as Bill and Hillary saw it: former special prosecutor Kenneth Starr.
Starr, a soft-spoken but thoughtful man, has had his motives impugned by Clinton himself, who told a Fox News reporter that the investigation into him led by Starr was not done with integrity. “There were things done in Arkansas . . . under Mr. Starr’s direction that were unforgivable, lots of them. And so no, I [do] not agree that it was done with honor and integrity,” Clinton said publicly in 2010. “I trusted the justice system and I trusted the press to cover it right, and I didn’t realize what the real game was. It was my fault as much as anything else for agreeing to be investigated, but I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong. And so they just kept it going on and on and on. It was a nightmare. And I think, as a result of it, we’ll never have it again. The only good thing to come out of it was, it killed this whole system. I don’t think there’ll ever be another one like this again.”11 Clinton loathed Starr, as he made clear to aides and occasionally to reporters.
Starr, who is now the president of Baylor University in Texas, said that while he hasn’t met with President Clinton since his investigation into him, he
would. Gladly. “Would you be willing to have a smoke?” Starr, with a laugh, says he was asked. “A smoke with the peace pipe. I’m from the West. I have Indian blood. I have been taught to talk that way—to have a time of possible reconciliation,” he explains. Starr, who wouldn’t name the Clinton associate who asked him, said he responded, “Of course. Anytime.” It hasn’t happened yet, but it’s likely one day soon it will.
Starr says he’s not surprised by the Clintons’ comeback in public esteem. “We . . . have short memories, and he’s lovable,” Starr now says of his former nemesis. “If he weren’t lovable, I mean then he would have an enormous problem.” If Clinton could charm Starr, even though he’s eviscerated him and his motives in public, one might wonder if anyone is safe from his charms.
“Listen,” Georgia Republican senator Johnny Isakson tells me. “If they ever write a book on charming initiatives, he ought to be on the book cover. He can charm anybody.”
Indeed, most people who have met him call Bill Clinton the most charming person they have ever met. “Clinton was the most talented politician I ever met, certainly the most charming man I ever saw,” says Brit Hume, who covered the Clinton White House for ABC News. “He was easygoing, seemingly, and he had an amiable way about him. All politicians have it to some extent, but he had it in spades. It was interesting to cover him because he could talk at incredible lengths, and would wield detailed knowledge on all sides of issues.”
“To a one-on-one, when you’re with him then, your whole world just kind of disappears—I don’t know if other people have said this—but he just kind of locks you in,” says one former longtime aide.
It’s a line I indeed heard from nearly everyone who interacted with President Clinton—usually from those who do not know him well. His eyes connect with yours and for that moment, you become the most important person in the world—to a person who is, or at least at one point was, the most important person in the world. People describe it as an exhilarating experience. Even people who once reviled Bill Clinton.
“He really does have some of the most remarkable eyes,” says Michael Medved. “Even though you know you’re being conned, when he looks at you, you have the impression that you’re the only person in the world, and that he is listening and hearing.”
Jim Nicholson recalls a time shortly after he began serving as chairman of the Republican National Committee when Father Andrew Greeley, one of the most well-known Catholics in America, went on television to express his opposition to the Bush-led war on Iraq. The priest went even further, announcing that it was a “mortal sin” for a good Catholic also to be a Republican. The pronouncement led to a predictable outcry, especially among the GOP faithful, who flooded RNC headquarters with irate calls and faxes demanding a response.
As Nicholson told the story and his reaction to it, the Bushes appeared largely uninterested. “They didn’t know Greeley from Schmeeley,” Nicholson says, laughing. “They don’t connect to the story at all. But Bill Clinton does.” (In short, Nicholson basically decided to do nothing, lest he engage in a “pissing contest” with the media-loving Catholic.)
Clinton not only knew who Father Greeley was, but also was well aware of his dozens of novels. So much so that he was conversant about various titles and characters. Many of those novels, Nicholson notes, have a “prurient” flavor. (Greeley was once dubbed “the dirtiest mind ever ordained.”) The principal characters, usually men of cloth, are involved in heavily sexual storylines. One character, for example, was a cardinal who’d broken the vow of celibacy with a mistress. Clinton appeared to have read them all. “Every one of them!” Nicholson exclaims in amazement.
“I was absolutely astonished,” Nicholson recalls. He also was clearly impressed. “When did he ever have time? And not only had he read them, but he remembered everything about them. I think he remembers everything he’s ever done; it seems like he remembers everybody he’s ever met.”
What Nicholson notices, Michael Medved tells me, is the true secret to the Clinton “charm”: the former president’s “freakish, phenomenal off-the-chart memory for people, faces, details about people.”
Medved relates the story of a woman named Winnie Lewellen, who managed a bed-and-breakfast called Wensley House in Chautauqua, New York. Many years ago, when Clinton was governor of Arkansas, he came up to the western New York town to deliver a speech. And he stayed at Winnie’s guesthouse. Clinton was never known as a great orator, and this speech too proved disappointingly long-winded and self-indulgent. Returning to the guesthouse after watching the speech, Winnie found a room in a shambles. “The room had very clear evidence of partying,” says a source familiar with the story. “There was broken glass. There was stuff spilled all over the place. There were papers strewn everywhere, and ashes and tobacco. The governor had clearly not spent the night alone.”
Winnie had never seen a room in such a state of disrepair. Disgusted, she hoped she’d never lay eyes on the man again. That very afternoon, however, she received a phone call.
“Hey, Winnie, it’s Governor Clinton,” said the voice on the other line. “I made a little mistake, and I’m hoping you can do a big favor for me.” Winnie assumed Clinton was planning to apologize for his rock-star antics. Instead he said, “I left some papers in there, and they’re really, really important.”
“You left more than papers in there, Governor,” Winnie replied, “and I cleaned everything up.”
Again without an apology or sense of shame, Clinton pressed, “Well, could you go to the Dumpster and get those papers because they’re a bunch of fund-raising calls I have to make?”
So Winnie went to the Dumpster, retrieved the papers, and returned to the phone. “Okay, I have the numbers,” she said. “Do you want me to send this to you?”
“No, no,” Clinton replied. “Just read me the phone numbers and the information.”
“Are you writing this down?”
“I don’t need to write it down. I’ll remember.”
She read him about twenty numbers, and he remembered everything. Every digit. “Thank you, Winnie,” he said in the hoarse singsong voice. “That’s just so wonderful. I love you, and I’ll never forget you.” Then he hung up.
Many years after Bill Clinton first stayed in Winnie Lewellen’s Chautauqua guesthouse, he returned to town as president to deliver another speech. Remembering how Clinton had unapologetically trashed his room and then called to ask her for a favor, Winnie was still simmering. However, she was too curious to resist attending Clinton’s latest speech in her small town.
After the speech, Clinton worked the rope line, where Winnie was standing, maybe four or five rows back. And then he saw her.
“Hey, Winnie! Winnie!” he cried out, his eyes locking on hers. “Boy, it’s great to see you. I told you I would never forget you.”
And that in essence is Bill Clinton. Self-indulgent, shameless, brilliant, capable, scandalous, and, for want of a less overused phrase, a consummate charmer. Like Winnie Lewellen, not everyone in Washington has fallen for Bill Clinton’s reported charms. Where some see a warmhearted, lovable sincerity, many others see pure calculation, even ruthlessness.
“When I first met him, there was no real charm,” recalls a veteran network reporter, who requested anonymity to speak more freely. “All I saw in his eyes was ice.”
Bill Richardson, stinging from the deterioration of his relationship with the former president, tells me his belief is “that every relationship that he has is mainly about him and not about the other person.” Richardson himself calls Clinton a megalomaniac who “presumes the world revolves around him.”12
Indeed, it is easy to overestimate Bill Clinton’s legendary powers of charm and persuasion, against which Hillary long has suffered in comparison. But Bill was not always so flawless in currying favor. To some he comes across as selfish, sad, and needy.
As a young man, for example, Clinton famously worshipped J. William Fulbright, the powerful United States senator from Ark
ansas. So much so that law school classmates still remember young Clinton’s obsession. “I don’t know anyone else who talked openly about his political plans like Bill Clinton,” one fellow student at Yale Law School recalls. “He was going to take over for J. William Fulbright, and he was already planning campaigns, and clearly, he had ambitions as a candidate, and that was considered kind of unusual and gross.”
Fulbright is mentioned fifty times in Clinton’s memoir, My Life, and the former president took great pride in working as a driver for Fulbright in 1968. “When we were driving from town to town on those hot country roads,” Clinton reflected in his memoir, “I would try to get Fulbright to talk. The conversations left me with great memories.”
But not, however, for Bill Fulbright, who viewed the young Clinton as selfish and transparent. It “sharply curtailed my career as his driver,” Clinton recalls. And as Fulbright later told family members, “We’d go somewhere, and I’d be in the car with him, and by the time I was out of the car he was already out of the car introducing himself to people all the time, never mentioning me.”
“The guy was unbelievable,” Fulbright would say to relatives. When Fulbright died in 1995, then-President Clinton spoke at his funeral and, according to observers, would not leave the scene, even as aides pressed him to go. Eventually the crowd of mourners diminished to Fulbright family members—and Bill Clinton. When the family decided to take a group picture after the funeral, Clinton still wouldn’t get the hint. “You have to look really carefully at the photo,” says a source connected to the Fulbright family, “but there’s Bill Clinton in the back with his face between the shoulders of two people.”
“Hillary has friends that go back to high school and Bill not so much. In fact, I would say not at all,” Michael Medved says. “Apparently the most emotional relationship in Bill’s life was Buddy the dog.”
Beneath Clinton’s smiles, a darker side constantly lingers, characterized by purple-faced tirades and a hair-trigger temper. “Look, you read the accounts from his administration inside the White House, and his temper is an occasional explosion,” says Brit Hume. “They are a part of his personality. I think he’s emotionally stunted in some ways. His feelings of guilt and shame, I think, are limited. I think his physical appetites are strong and shall we say dominant, but he does have the capacity to get mad briefly.”
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