Audition (76 page)

Still, I never felt that I really got through to Clinton. I never experienced his renowned sex appeal. He never sparkled with me. I remember from Katharine Graham’s superb autobiography that she felt President John Kennedy more or less overlooked her because she wasn’t young. I felt the same way about myself and Bill Clinton. I interviewed him in September 1996. (It was three years before I conducted my interview with Monica Lewinsky, the White House intern with whom he had an affair.) Our conversation was not memorable to me.

However, I’ve seen Bill Clinton quite a few times since he left office, at dinners or charitable events. Now, whenever we meet, he is warm and friendly. Maybe, when I am not asking questions, he feels more comfortable. At private dinners he talks and talks and talks. He rarely takes questions from the other guests. Fortunately what he has to say is always worth listening to.

Still, to me, the most interesting member of that family is Hillary Clinton, with whom I’ve conducted several interviews both in and out of the White House. If I didn’t feel back then that I got President Clinton’s message, I certainly felt I got hers. Besides my own interviews, I’d watched her address groups, small and large, and never use notes. She has a great throaty laugh that is contagious. I remember going to a very private birthday dinner for her when she was in the White House. One of the toasts was delivered by the late Peter Stone, a successful writer of Broadway shows and movies. Peter raised his glass, and looking around the room at the many Jewish guests who were friends of Hillary’s, said: “Please join me in toasting the nation’s First Shiksa.” We all laughed, Hillary the loudest.

This is what I remember most. It was June 2003. The big “get” that late spring was Hillary Clinton. Her autobiography,
Living History
, was about to be published. The book was being kept under heavy wraps, and nobody knew what areas it would cover, where it would begin, or how much Mrs. Clinton would say about her relationship with her husband. Everyone at every network and cable news program wanted to do that first interview with her. I wanted to get it for
20/20
, but because I had done the interview with Monica Lewinsky, ABC didn’t think I stood a chance. “Stay out of it,” I was told. “You will only muddy the waters.” The reasoning was that if I tried, I might offend Clinton’s people and jeopardize the possibility of the Hillary interview going to any ABC correspondent. Accordingly my name was not on the list of correspondents ABC sent to the Clinton camp. I accepted that.

The only conversation I had concerning the book was with someone I knew slightly who had worked with Mrs. Clinton at the White House and had been retired for many years. She and I met at a baby shower, and in the course of conversation I remarked that whoever got the interview should try to take Mrs. Clinton back to her childhood home in the suburbs of Chicago to see what her life was like there. Then I thought we would really understand her. It was a casual remark, and I didn’t give it another thought.

So you can understand why I almost literally fell off my chair when, two weeks later, Mrs. Clinton’s very able lawyer, Bob Barnett, telephoned and said: “Can you and your ABC people meet with me tomorrow, someplace private, to discuss the terms of the interview with Senator Clinton?” Lo and behold, I was the chosen one! It created some ripples within the news division, but at least ABC got the interview.

When I read the book I realized why I might have been chosen to conduct the interview. The first third of the book was about her childhood in the town of Park Ridge, Illinois, and the influences that made her the woman she is. I think it’s likely that my chance remark at the baby shower had been passed along to her decision makers.

Whatever the reason, I thought the fact that Mrs. Clinton chose me said miles about her. I was, after all, the reporter who had done the interview with the woman who had caused her and her husband such pain, but she didn’t hold that against me.

I did indeed ask her to take me back to her hometown. There we had a chance to spend the kind of time that is not possible in a formal sit-down interview. We visited the house in which she grew up with her staunchly Republican father and closet Democrat mother, and we had “olive burgers” at a little tavern next to the town’s only movie theater. Mrs. Clinton was happy to talk about the little girl she had been and the more grown-up girl who would fall in love with Bill Clinton. In my past interviews with Mrs. Clinton I hadn’t really liked or disliked her. She was smart, crisp, often evasive, and fairly formal. Now as we laughed together and talked about how much she had loved Bill Clinton’s hands, I really liked her. But I had a job to do.

When we finished this part of the interview, we made arrangements for our next session at her home in Chappaqua, New York. There we were going to have to deal with Monica Lewinsky. “It won’t be as easy a conversation the next time we meet,” I told her. “I know,” she said. “I’m dreading it, but I realize we have to talk about it.”

And we did. She talked about how furious she was with her husband when he finally told her the truth about Monica. How she considered leaving him. How in the end she could only trust her own judgment in deciding what to do because “your friends won’t be there at three in the morning.”

“How could you stay in this marriage?” I asked. “Because,” she said, “no one understands me better and no one can make me laugh the way Bill does. Even after all these years, he is still the most interesting, energizing, and fully alive person I have ever met.”

She expected me to ask those questions, but she didn’t expect, and didn’t like, what came next. Nor, I heard, did her husband when he watched the interview. I had mulled over just how and when I was going to ask: “What if he does it again?” I knew it would be hard for her to answer, but I had to ask. Her answer was a nonanswer. “That will be between us, and that will be the zone of privacy that I believe in. But right now, I am very, very hopeful and very committed to our marriage.”

Passage of time: In the fall of 2007, I had the opportunity to interview Bill Clinton again, this time for our
10 Most Fascinating People Special.
His wife was now a presidential candidate. Clinton, at least to me, seemed a changed man—warm, friendly, smiling, and seemingly very much at peace with himself. Our interview was conducted in his spacious office in Harlem. On the walls are a broad array of photographs, ranging from Dr. Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela to old-time jazz musicians and family and friends. There are books everywhere, many of them first editions.

The interview had its light moments, such as when I asked if he planned to take over the traditional role of first lady should his wife become president, like presiding over the White House Easter egg hunt or showing off the Christmas decorations. Clinton replied: “Sure. We love the holidays. Chelsea still comes home every Thanksgiving and cooks a Thanksgiving meal for us and a bunch of her friends, and we take in strays who are a long way from home or don’t have a family. So if I am asked to be involved in any of that Christmas celebration or Easter stuff, I’d love to do it.” (Social editors, take note. President Clinton may well be your guide to the Christmas tree decorations as first gentleman or whatever he may be called.)

The more moving part of my interview, however, was when I asked what impact, if any, his quadruple bypass surgery had on him. Evidently, it had had quite an effect. “I think it’s made me more grateful for every day I have alive,” he said. “All the things that used to bother me don’t seem very important anymore. I think it made me more determined to use my time in a way that gives other people the chance to live the life I’ve had. A lot of people might have thought it was tragic if I had perished at a young age, but the truth is I would still have had a life more full, more rich, than the vast majority of people who have ever lived. I look at flowers more than I used to. I notice how the air smells when the seasons change. Those things mean something to me again, like they did when I was a boy. I both love the small things in the world and I sweat the small things less.”

His answer might seem predictable and maybe corny but at last he got through to me.

As for Barack Obama, I can only offer a footnote. My fault, not his. In the fall of 2007, Obama, now a candidate for president, was interviewed by Richard Parsons, the CEO of Time Warner, before a select audience of Parson’s friends and journalists. When the session was over, Obama stayed a while shaking hands in a most pleasant fashion. When I approached him he said how nice it was to see me. I then said I wished he would consider appearing on
The View.
Obama looked rather surprised and said he had already been on
The View
when a revised edition of his book
Dreams from My Father
, was published in 2004. (He was then the senator-elect from Illinois.) I gushingly apologized for not remembering and added, “I’m so sorry I wasn’t on the program that day.” “Oh,” Obama replied, “but you were.” Where is that trap door when you need it?

George W. Bush may also seem predictable and not always wise to me, but he certainly has been good to me. I had little recollection of him from our dinner together at the White House when his father was president, and I wasn’t sure what to expect when I first met him as a presidential candidate. He was visiting New York, and Karen Hughes, then his trusted communications adviser, invited me to come up to his hotel suite. He bounced into the living room, confident as all get-out. He told me he was sure he was going to be president, gave me a strong handshake and a wink (he likes to wink), and that was pretty much it. I was surprised at his certainty. From what I had heard, he was more or less wishy-washy. I sure didn’t feel that.

When he was nominated, I started my usual writing and calling for an interview, and hit a home run right after the election. I was invited down to his ranch in Crawford to talk with him just two days before he left for his inauguration in Washington in January 2001.

The interview was done in the barn, which was very wet and soggy, and my boots (no high heels here) were drenched and caked with mud. Whenever I saw Bush in the future, he would take delight in reminding me of the mud on my boots.

Was he nervous about being president, I asked. Not a bit. “I can’t wait to get up there,” he said. “I can’t wait to get started.” This was not an uncertain governor. This was the next president of the United States, and we’d better know it.

Unlike my open-ended interviews with the freewheeling Bill Clinton, my first interview with Bush—like other interviews with him in the future—were all strictly timed. I would be told, for example, that I had twenty-nine minutes and no more, and then I would have all kinds of time to walk around the White House with the dogs trailing or, as in the case of this first interview, to tour the ranch with Bush driving his jeep—shades of my interview with Ronald Reagan. Not only were interviews precisely timed, so were social events and White House dinners. Clinton liked to schmooze and perhaps even dance after a dinner; Bush believed in early to bed and little socializing when the meal was finished. During his eight years in office, I was invited to three Bush White House dinners. Each time the entertainment ended at 10:00 p.m. The president then took to the stage, thanked everybody for coming, and by 10:10 we were out of there.

Back to the ranch. To my eyes it wasn’t exactly a ranch, more of a “ranchette.” It was in the middle of nowhere. Well, actually not exactly nowhere. It was near Waco, Texas. Bush drove me over a few small hills, the area being almost completely flat, and by some small streams and a tiny waterfall. On the way back to the house he pointed out the small artificial lake in front of the house, which he had stocked with fish.

The house itself was quite modest. Mrs. Bush was just furnishing it. The president-elect took me into his small office. There was a painted stove, which, he said, was a gift from his father. When he opened the door of the stove, there were rifles. The office also had a computer, but Bush told me that from this day forward he would send no e-mails. “Too dangerous,” he said.

I interviewed President Bush four more times during his eight years in office. Our interviews, now held in the White House, were substantive, although Bush rarely strayed from his well-known opinions and fairly rigid script. Same questions about Iraq. Same answers. But what has stayed with me the most is what he had to say about his faith. His faith is an intimate part of his life, and what I wanted to know was how much, if at all, his beliefs affected his decision making. I brought up the subject in two separate interviews. In 2005 he told me this: “Faith is a very important part of my being able to handle the pressures of the job. Other presidents might feel differently about it. I don’t. I am sustained by prayer, my own prayer and the fact that others pray for me.”

Another time when I asked how accepting God in his life motivated his decision making, he said, “I don’t think it necessarily makes the decisions of war and peace any different, but it makes me as a person different than I was.” He went on, “I’m a fierce competitor. I want to win. But if it doesn’t work out, I will have accepted my fate here and part of that acceptance, part of the calm that I feel, is a result of my religion.”

There will, of course, come the day when President Bush will go back for good to that ranch in Texas. When he does finally return home, I daresay, he will do it with a feeling of calm. However his presidency ends, he will no doubt have “accepted his fate.”

Heads of State: The Good, the Bad, and the Mad

H
EADS OF STATE.
Oh, the power! Oh, the glory! Oh, the climb up! Oh, the fall! From the democratically elected to the chosen by birth, chosen by coup, chosen by war, chosen by edict, chosen by hook or by crook. I have tried to think of what each has in common with the others. One quality stands out: belief in yourself. The conviction that only
you
can do the job. The shah of Iran felt he was born to be emperor. Fidel Castro told me that if he wanted to resign, his countrymen would consider it treason. Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin both were fatalists. Each thought God had endowed him with the wisdom to lead, though their gods had different names.