Love & War
Page 26
As I waddled uncomfortably (for many reasons) down the fancy foyer, President Bill Clinton did what he always does in those awkward situations: he finds the most unworthy low-status human being in the room and comes to their aid.
So he made a beeline for me, and he started telling me everything he would do if he were Bob Dole—to beat the Clinton reelect campaign.
He was giving me a complete, perfectly thought-out Dole strategy, and he seemed more excited about telling me all the ways that Bob Dole could really challenge him, and win, than by anything else happening in that moment. I hadn’t expected to like him. I hadn’t expected to have a good time at all (except for Stevie Wonder). But just being with Clinton was so arousing and compelling (but not in that way). Talking politics on that level with a fellow lifelong junkie was and still is a singularly thrilling event. Who could imagine it? Not me, and certainly not before that night, despite years of being subjected to James’s adoration of the man.
Even with my surging pregnancy hormones and bloated belly, the irony was not lost on me: Bill Clinton was telling me what to advise Senator Dole so he could beat Bill Clinton right after I had been basically fired as a volunteer from the Dole campaign because I was married to James, who had put me in proximity to Clinton.
What was his advice to Dole?
“Let Bob Dole be Bob Dole. Get off his neck. Let him be a full-throated Republican. Quit trying to make him something he’s not. And make him stay on his message. He has a message, but you all have him jammed up with your message and anyone can tell he doesn’t believe it.”
This is a very truncated rendition of a very long gabfest. I am making it sound like standard stuff, but his articulation and passion for the topic was very sophisticated and compelling—and totally dead-on.
JAMES
I’VE LEARNED SOME GREAT lessons in life from Bill Clinton. And one was his rule for working a room: the moment you walk in, you pick out the most vulnerable, least powerful person and you go talk to that person first and foremost. You knock the MVP over to hug the guy who dropped the game-winning pass. Everybody notices it. And he’s probably the more interesting guy to talk with, anyway.
Clinton has a sixth sense about that. If there’s somebody in a room whose mother died the day before, he’s going to know it instinctively. He just knows who needs the attention most. That’s who he focuses on, and people instinctively understand it.
He’s the best at it. But it’s a good rule for anybody. That and complimenting people about their children and grandchildren. Those are two rules that are never, ever going to fail you.
MARY
WHEN YOU ARE IN A CAMPAIGN, your total window on the world is politics. But when you are a mother, your prism narrows to your kids and their immediate world. Politics aside, when you are the mother of daughters, you want them to see successful, strong, articulate, accomplished women in positions of power. You hope your daughters won’t necessarily listen to some of the things being propagated by these women, but you do hope your girls will be encouraged by their example to be bold in their lives and follow their passions.
Such was the case with Hillary Rodham Clinton. The three of us gals—Matty, Emerson and I—of disparate and opposite politics, sat in the kitchen and cried when the news came over our little TV that her coronation was not to be.
JAMES
LET ME PUT IT THIS WAY. If Al Gore had been president, 9/11 never would have happened.
The reasons that people don’t like Gore are the very reasons it wouldn’t have happened. First of all, he is very, very anal. Very detail oriented. He used to read the Presidential Daily Brief, or PDB, and if he had a question, he would go out to Langley and ask the CIA analysts about it directly because he understood how things sometimes got filtered or watered down as they went up the food chain.
If Gore would’ve gotten that brief in August 2001, the one headlined BIN LADEN DETERMINED TO STRIKE IN U.S., he would have understood the gravity of the threat.
Plenty of people knew that summer that something was brewing. Richard Clarke and lots of other folks in the intelligence community were running around with their hair on fire, warning about a possible al-Qaeda attack, but they couldn’t get the top Bush people to pay attention. Gore would have had the entire government on high alert.
Bill Clinton was acutely attuned to the dangers of al-Qaeda by the latter part of his tenure, and so was Gore. They’d been through the U.S. embassy bombings and the bombing of the USS Cole. They knew how determined al-Qaeda was.
Gore could be a cumbersome, difficult guy, but he was an extremely thorough man. He was nothing like George W. Bush, who was very casual, very cavalier about making decisions. Bush had a supreme confidence; he didn’t spend a lot of time second-guessing himself. Gore would’ve been a president who would have second-guessed himself. He would have studied things. He would have had doubts. And he would have followed up.
Of course, you can’t prove a hypothetical. There’s no way you can go back and know for sure. But knowing the nature of Gore’s past conduct and the type of person he is, I’ll go to my grave believing that if he were president history would have turned out differently; 9/11 might have been just another sunny September day.
• • •
People ask me why I keep crisscrossing the world to work on foreign political campaigns. The answer is pretty simple.
There’s this story about an up-and-coming, really ferocious boxer. They put him in the ring with this washed-up thirty-six-year-old fighter who’s only getting paid $500 for the fight. And predictably, the young guy just bloodies the shit out of the old guy. Knocks him out in three rounds.
Afterward, everybody’s clamoring to interview the rising star. But one reporter goes over to the old fighter and asks him, “Why do you keep doing this? There’s not much money in it. There was no way you were gonna win.”
And the guy says, “A fight is a fight.”
That’s what the foreign stuff represents to me. The money is fine, though not what people might imagine. I’ll spend it. But the main reason is that it’s just what I do. I like the challenge. I love politics, whether it’s America or Africa or Afghanistan. A fight is a fight.
The most important campaign I’ve taken on since Bill Clinton’s took place in Afghanistan in 2009, but it began with a meeting in Washington.
I met one afternoon with Steve Cohen, a Harvard-trained psychologist who runs the Institute for Middle East Peace and Development. He’s a really decent, thoughtful guy who genuinely believes peace in that region is attainable.
A woman came with him named Clare Lockhart, an incredibly bright woman who’d spent years working in Afghanistan and had developed a deep understanding of the place. She’d advised the U.S. military and various governments on everything from how to put in place a new monetary system to how to create a national police force. Back in 2005, she’d cofounded the Institute for State Effectiveness with a guy named Ashraf Ghani, who had been Afghanistan’s finance minister in the new government that took over after 9/11. The two of them had written a book about fixing failed states and the mistakes people so often make in nation-building.
Steve and Clare were gushing about Ghani, saying he was the sort of guy—smart, ethical, hardworking, charismatic—who could actually put Afghanistan back on a path toward economic and political stability. Ghani, an ethnic Pashtun, had gotten a PhD from Columbia and taught at the University of California-Berkeley and Johns Hopkins. He’d done all this research about transforming failed states. He was a Fulbright scholar. He’d worked at the World Bank and the U.N. After decades abroad, he’d come back to Afghanistan after the U.S. invasion in late 2001 to work as the country’s finance minister, a job he did pro bono.
The guy sounded almost too good to be true. I was intrigued, but skeptical. Also, if I went to advise him on his campaign, I would be going to work for someone who the U.S. government hadn’t b
acked. Technically, the United States had made clear that it wasn’t endorsing any of the dozens of candidates in the upcoming election, but it had stood behind Hamid Karzai from the very beginning.
I called up Richard Holbrooke, who I’d known forever and whose opinion I really valued. He was working as the White House’s special representative for Pakistan and Afghanistan.
I said, “Richard, I’ve just been contacted here about this Ashraf Ghani, who is running for president of Afghanistan. What do you know about him?”
He said, “Ashraf Ghani is simply one of the finest people I have ever met in my life.”
And I said, “Well, I don’t mind doing something like this if you say he’s so good. But I’m pretty sure they can’t pay me much. I don’t even think they can pay my expenses to get over there.”
Richard said, “James, you’re a member of the Kennedy generation. You don’t get a chance to work for somebody like Ashraf Ghani very often. You have to do this.”
I said, “Well, shit. If you’re going to pull out John F. Kennedy on me, I guess I’ll go.”
So I went. It ain’t an easy place to get to, because you’ve got to go through somewhere like Dubai, and then spend the night, then catch a plane into Kabul. It’s like an entire day of traveling. And by the time I showed up, I was tired. I was restless. I still wasn’t sure this was a good idea.
It turned out to be worth every ounce of effort. I went to see Ghani. And the guy is literally—and I use this word with great caution and understanding—almost saintly. I don’t know how else to describe it, but I had the sense that I was almost in the presence of a holy man. He kind of reminded you of Gandhi. Bald head. Soft-spoken.
He said, “Well, I can’t pay you very much. But I’ll give you this rug.” Fine with me. I rolled it up and put it in my suitcase, and we got right to work. I helped him on his strategy and tried to figure out how to win over certain people quickly, because there is only a short window to campaign before the presidential election in Afghanistan.
The way it works, basically, is everybody pretty much has to cut deals with various warlords. One guy had control of this area; another guy had control of that area. And you have to convince these guys that they should tell their people to vote for you. A campaign, in the traditional sense, didn’t really matter that much in Afghanistan. It wasn’t like Ghani had a message he was trying to get out with stump speeches and TV commercials. It was about who you knew and who with power you could win over. I said in one interview that I felt right at home because it reminded me in some ways of Louisiana.
But it also felt like meaningful work. I told the AP one day that this was the most important election held in the world in a long time and that “this is probably the most interesting project I have ever worked on in my life.” I meant it. Ghani was a fascinating, engaging, brilliant guy. He would have made a great president.
Of course, in the end, he got only about 3 percent of the vote. In a place like that, you don’t always win on your merits. Sometimes, you lose badly. But I’ve never once regretted that experience.
• • •
As I said in 40 More Years, if Barack Obama the human being was born on August 4, 1961, at 7:24 p.m., then Barack Obama the presidential candidate was born at 12:50 a.m. on October 11, 2002. That is the day, the hour and the minute that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton voted to go to war in Iraq. It was what sank her in 2008. There was a lot written and said about the ’08 campaign team and the personalities and delegate strategy, but that vote was the single most important factor in her defeat that year.
11.
Katrina
MARY
JAMES IS HIGHLY ATTUNED TO WEATHER. When a storm is forecasted, he isn’t one of those people who says, “Oh, they always exaggerate, they always get it wrong and overhype.” James doesn’t even bother with TV. He is one of those people who knows every special weather website that has Doppler radar and every imaginable type of technology. When a storm is coming, especially a hurricane—which James always references as a “weather system,” like he’s some TWC weather babe—he is the first one on high alert and the one to make predictions, which are 99.9 percent accurate.
In 2003, when Hurricane Isabel came to the D.C. metro area, he was racing around like a crazy man doing his storm-prevention activities, sandbagging every door, hoarding food, ice and Maker’s Mark—and crabbing at me for not letting him buy a generator. What a drama queen, I thought. I was laughing at him until the first floor of our brand-new Alexandria house (the boxes were still unpacked from the move) was floating in Potomac River muck. I don’t laugh anymore.
JAMES
IN THE DAYS AFTER Hurricane Katrina hit in August 2005, my phone never stopped ringing, and I never stopped calling Louisiana. The images rolling across the television—of the submerged city, of some people being rescued from rooftops and others enduring the abysmal conditions at the Superdome and the convention center—were hard enough to swallow. But the stories from friends and family made the devastation personal and painful. I felt like someone had punched me in the gut. I felt as far away from home as I’d ever felt.
I have a sister who lost her house in Slidell, a community northeast of New Orleans near Lake Pontchartrain, which got hit as hard as anywhere in Louisiana. Her family was staying with another of my sisters near Baton Rouge, not knowing when or if they’d ever get back home. The school she worked at was flooded, and her husband worked for the Exxon Mobil pipeline in St. Bernard Parish, which also flooded, and neither of them knew when they might get back to work.
My brother, a contractor, had a business associate whose father had terminal brain cancer and had to be evacuated from his home. The father ended up staying at my brother’s house in Baton Rouge. When the electricity went out, my brother borrowed a generator from his business so the guy could have air-conditioning in the sweltering heat.
That was just the story of my family. One family. I kept thinking of the hundreds of thousands of other families impacted by the storm—many far worse than mine—and about the hell so many people were experiencing.
In public, I tried to put a positive spin on the situation.
“Sure, it’s going to be rebuilt,” I told Wolf Blitzer one day on CNN. “A lot of people love New Orleans, not just me because I lived there and got married there and my kids love it, but people from all over the country.”
“Maybe it comes back stronger,” I told a reporter from USA Today. “No one forgot how to play the saxophone or how to cook or write. Or have a good time. That’s all still there. Calamities and disasters are part of New Orleans’ history. This too shall pass.”
But the truth was, I didn’t know if it would come back stronger, or come back at all. I wasn’t sure I believed my own spin.
What I was sure of was that I needed to do something, anything, to fight the helplessness I was feeling from one thousand miles away. I called up Chris Farley, who owns the Pacers running stores around Washington, where I was a regular customer, and we decided to hold a charity 5K called the Gulf Coast Relief Run. The city of Alexandria quickly agreed to permit the event, and a handful of corporate sponsors also signed on. Tony Kornheiser, who’s a dear friend of mine, jumped in to help out. Mary pitched in too.
A race like that normally would take months to plan. You have to take out permits and line up sponsors. You have to get the local police to give their blessing. We put it all together in two weeks. Those hectic days of organizing made me feel like I was at least contributing to the recovery in some way, and it kept me from dwelling completely on the horrors still unfolding in Louisiana.
The run took place on Saturday, September 17, at nine a.m. We thought we might get five hundred people. More than three thousand signed up. I couldn’t have been prouder. At the end of the day, we handed the Red Cross a check for $114,000. It was a drop in the bucket given all the need in Louisiana, but it was something.
That’s exactly what happened after the race. One day, there was this sudden silence. That’s when the stark reality of what had happened back home began to set in. I began to grasp the magnitude of the devastation and how New Orleans really might never be the place I had always known. I started to cry, and I literally couldn’t stop.
MARY
WE WERE AT THE FARM BEFORE KATRINA, and James had been in Doppler mode 24/7 for days. He was obsessing about a “weather system” in the Gulf. I knew better than to question him after our Isabel debacle, but to me the system looked like one more swirling multicolored cotton-candy cartoon. And it was far, far away from our quiet Shenandoah Valley.
It’s not easy to distinguish the normally crazy James from the abnormally insane one, but one telltale sign is that he focuses like a rabid dog that’s gotten ahold of raw steak bone. That was James as he stared lasers into that “system” on his computer and the TV.
Much has been written about Katrina and most of the political accounts are flat-ass wrong. I remember being surprised when my White House buddy Steve Schmidt told me while the storm was still raging, “We will be defined by this.” Usually my political instincts trump all other reactions. But in the case of Katrina, there was too much personal going on to think politically.