Adventures in Correspondentland (11 page)

In the run-up to the trips, we happily surrendered our passports to a US immigration official and were not handed them back until we returned to Washington. It meant we enjoyed the bliss of passport-free travel, jetting from one country to the next unencumbered by customs, immigration or any brush with local officialdom and sometimes even the locals themselves.

From the moment we left Andrews Air Force Base, we were pretty much ensnared inside ‘The Bubble', a mobile West Wing, near hermetically sealed, that would move from country to country, city to city, and from one windowless ballroom to the next. These bland, featureless digs served as our temporary filing centres,
where the desks were laid out according to the usual ranking system. (The only time that I ever witnessed a departure from the rankings was when those champion bureaucrats at Vnukovo International Airport on the outskirts of Moscow refused to play ball with our usual passport-less travel ruse and demanded that we collect our documentation, one by one in alphabetical order. Being a ‘B', I was one of the fluky ones. Pity poor
La Repubblica
's White House correspondent, Arturo Zampaglione.)

Regardless of where we went, we were shuttled around town in buses that never stopped for traffic lights and were accompanied everywhere by motorcycle outriders wearing polished white leather gloves. The ‘green corridor' it was called. Then we would faithfully record each of the president's intricately stage-managed appearances with his hosts. To help us keep track of what was said, the White House transcription service was always on hand, like a wandering band of courtroom stenographers, to provide us with a verbatim record of every utterance. To help us keep track of what was thought, White House aides would occasionally deliver background briefings, providing scraps of information that we gobbled up like performing seals being tossed small sardines by their handlers, an aquatic reworking of Pavlov's dogs.

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.

After he had handed over to George W. Bush and been choppered from Capitol Hill, Clinton decided to break with custom and deliver a departing speech to a campaign-style rally in a hangar at Andrews Air Force Base. Already that day, he had blotted the next chapter of his life by pardoning Marc Rich, a fugitive millionaire felon whose main claim to fame up until that moment had been his appearance on the FBI's ‘Ten Most Wanted List'. Now, with this final indulgence at Andrews, he tested the forbearance of even his most devoted followers.

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.