Bill Clinton's World

The former president tells Foreign Policy what to read, who to watch, and why there really is a chance of Middle East peace in 2010.

DECEMBER 2009

If you wanted to know how Bill Clinton thought when he was president, you ignored the scripted set-piece speeches and instead went to listen to him talk off the cuff at an evening fundraiser. At night, he would ruminate extemporaneously on race, religion, science, and the nature of the human soul. His mind would roam widely and yet pull together disparate themes into a coherent narrative as no other politician of his generation. Today, the place to hear him think out loud is at the annual Clinton Global Initiative conference in New York, where he gathers hundreds of heads of state, business moguls, nonprofit executives, academics, and even Hollywood stars not just to talk about the world's problems but to do something about them.

Peter Baker, White House correspondent for the New York Times, and Susan Glasser, Foreign Policy's executive editor, caught up with Clinton there for an expansive conversation about identity, virtue, and riding the steppes with Genghis Khan. Below, the edited excerpts.

Foreign Policy: Last year we did not expect the economy to collapse quite the way it did. This year we did not think the people of Iran would take to the streets after the election. Looking ahead to 2010, what are the strategic surprises we ought to be looking for?

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The FP Top 100 Global Thinkers

They had the big ideas that shaped our world in 2009.

Bill Clinton: We should look around the world and see if there are any places where the political analogue of the financial crisis could occur. That is, what we know about all systems subject to a combination of stress and dynamism is that there are fractures and vulnerabilities that are not immediately apparent because people expect tomorrow to be a replica of yesterday and today. I always say, in a highly dynamic environment, it's obvious you should always be working for the best and preparing for the worst. That's easy to say, but how do you do that? And what are the warning signs? For example, could something go wrong in Nigeria as a result of a combination of economic and political conflict?

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Bill Clinton on what to expect in 2010 and the world leaders he admires most.

On the flip side, which other places in the world could still surprise us by doing something really smart and good? I still think there is some chance the Israelis and the Hamas government and the Palestinian government could make a deal. Because I think that the long-term trend lines are bad for both sides that have the capacity to make a deal. Right now, Hamas is kind of discredited after the Gaza operation, and yet [the Palestinian Authority] is clearly increasing [its] capacity. They are in good shape right now, but if they are not able to deliver sustained economic and political advances, that's not good for them. The long-term trends for the Israelis are even more stark, because they will soon enough not be a majority. Then they will have to decide at that point whether they will continue to be a democracy and no longer be a Jewish state, or continue to be a Jewish state and no longer be a democracy. That's the great spur.

The other thing that has not been sufficiently appreciated is the inevitable arc of technological capacity that applies to military weaponry, like it does to pcs and video games and everything else. I know that these rockets drove the Israelis nuts, and I didn't blame them for being angry and frustrated -- it was maddening. But let's be candid: They were not very accurate. So it's only a question of time until they are de facto outfitted with GPS positioning systems. And when that happens and the casualty rates start to really mount, will that make it more difficult for the Palestinians to make peace instead of less? Because they will be even more pressed by the radical groups saying, "No, no, look, look, we are making eight out of 10 hits. Let's stay at this." I think one of the surprising things that might happen this year [2010] is you might get a substantial agreement. Nobody believes this will happen, and it probably won't, because of the political complexity of the Israeli government. But all I can tell you is, I spent a lot of time when I was president trying to make a distinction between the headlines and the trend lines. If there was ever a place where studying the trend lines would lead you to conclude that sooner is better than later for deal-making, it would be there.

FP: Who do you think is the smartest, most penetrating thinker you know (maybe other than your own family)? Are there people who should be on our list?

BC: Paul Krugman -- I don't always agree with him, but he is unfailingly good. David Brooks has been very good. Tom Friedman is our most gifted journalist at actually looking at what is happening in the world and figuring out its relevance to tomorrow and figuring out a clever way to say it that sticks in your mind-like "real men raise the gas tax." You know what I mean?

Malcolm Gladwell has become quite important. The Tipping Point was a very good observational book about what happened and how change occurred. But I think his last book, Outliers, is even more important for understanding how we all develop and for making the case that even for people we view as geniuses, life is more of a relay race than a one-night stand by a one-man band or a one-woman band. I thought it was a truly exceptional book.

Robert Wright, the guy who wrote The Evolution of God, The Moral Animal, and the book he wrote in the middle, which had a huge effect on me as the president, Nonzero. This book about God is just basically an extension of his argument in Nonzero, which is essentially that the world is growing together, not apart. And as you have wider and wider circles of interconnection -- that is, wider geographically, encompassing more people, and wider in bandwidth, encompassing more subject areas -- you begin with conflict and you end with some resolution, some merging. So he says there is not an inherent conflict between science and God, and he explains why. Wright says, no, no, no, the religious and scientific can mix in accommodation. In Nonzero he argues that ever since people came out of caves and formed clans, people have been bumping up against each other, requiring expansion of identity, subconscious identity. You move from conflict to cooperation in some form or fashion. And so far the struggle between conflict and cooperation has come out before humanity triggered its capacity for self-destruction. So that whole Nonzero idea has now been translated into his argument on God, and I think he is a very important guy.

Another person I think has written some very interesting books on the ultimate imperative of cooperation in the human and other species is Matt Ridley. The one that had a pretty good influence on me is The Origins of Virtue. And by virtue he doesn't mean, I never take a drink, even on Saturday night. He means civic virtue. How do we treat one another in ways that are constructive, and work together? I think that these are some of the many people. They are thinking about how the world works and how it might be at the same time. At this moment in history, we need people who have a unique understanding of both how the world works and how it might be better, might be more harmonious.

FP: The Cold War lasted about 40 years. Do you see this current struggle we are having with extremism, whatever you want to call it, the war on terror, do you see that lasting as long, or do you see that changing in some way over the next decade?

BC: How long it lasts depends on whether the places out of which really big, effective terrorist groups are operating remain essentially stateless. The territories in Pakistan and the border area with Afghanistan are not part of a centralized state. Robert Kaplan has written tons of books about what's going on in the modern world, and if you read The Ends of the Earth and these books that say we are de facto, no matter what the laws say, becoming nations of mega-city-states full of really poor, angry, uneducated, and highly vulnerable people, all over the world, we would have a lot of slumdog millionaires. If that's right, then terror -- meaning killing and robbery and coercion by people who do not have state authority and go beyond national borders -- could be around for a very long time. On the other hand, terrorism needs both anxiety and opportunity to flourish. So one of the things that the United States and others ought to be doing is trying to help the nation-state adjust to the realities of the 21st century and then succeed.

Resolving energy, ironically, could play a major role in reducing the appeal of terror because if we change the way we produce and consume energy all over the world, it would create opportunities for education, for entrepreneurs, for work, for involving women and girls in positive economic encounters, at every level of national income from the richest states to the poorest. Therefore, I think all of the creative energy thinkers need to be brought to bear on this because the world as it integrates has to have a source of new economic activity. In the poorer places just getting agriculture up to speed and putting all the kids in school, there is enough to keep going for a few years. But this energy thing could give us a decade of exhilarating self-discovery. Really smart energy thinkers, Amory Lovins, Paul Hawken, people who have been doing this for 30 years -- what they've always known, before this ever became a serious debate, is, you couldn't sell a clean green future unless you could prove it was good economics.

You should look at big thinkers on the question of identity. Samuel Huntington wrote the famous book The Clash of Civilizations. But we need an effort to explain and, if possible merge, theories of identity that are biological, psychological, social, and political, because it's obvious that in an age of interdependence, you want Wright's thesis, you want there to be more nonzero subsolutions. You want this thing to happen; you hope he is right that you can reconcile religion and science; you hope the president's speech in Cairo turns out to be right, that it's a walk in the park to reconcile religious differences. I gave a bunch of speeches on this after 9/11, saying that our religious and political differences could be reconciled. I think President Obama's word was that we had to respect doubt.

What I always said was that if you are religious it meant by definition there was such a thing as Truth, capital T. So to make it work in a world full of differences, you had to recognize that there was a big distinction between the existence of Truth, capital T, and the ability of any one human being to understand it completely and to translate it into political actions that were 100 percent consistent with it. That's what you had to do; all you had to do was accept human frailty. You can't tell people of faith to be relative about their faith. They believe there is a truth. But the question of whether they can know it and turn it into a political program is a very, very different thing. That is an act of arrogance.

I was influenced by Ken Wilber's book A Theory of Everything, because he tries to point out that throughout history we get connected to people who are different from us before our heads get around the implications of that, and then as soon as they do there is a parallel level of interconnectivity and we have to get our heads around that. All of the public intellectuals in the world need to be thinking quite a bit about this question of identity and need to recognize that in view of the findings of the human genome about the similarities of all of us, even the husband and wife who at the minimum are 99.5 percent the same -- it's pretty spooky, isn't it?

FP: Lightning round: What are the three books you've been reading recently?

BC: I am reading H.W. Brands's book on FDR. I am reading the new biography of Gabriel García Márquez, and I just finished Joshua Cooper Ramo's book, which I thought was actually quite good, but I think he should write another one and think about the practical applications of the strategic insights and the theoretical insights.

FP: Top three leaders that people should pay attention to, other than Obama.

BC: The prime minister of Australia, Kevin Michael Rudd -- he is really smart. He has a thirst to know and figure out how to do things.

I think people should study what Paul Kagame did in Rwanda. It is the only country in the world that has more women than men in Parliament (obviously part of the demographic is from the genocide). It may not be perfect, but Rwanda has the greatest capacity of any developing country I have seen to accept outside help and make use of it. It's hard to accept help. They've done that. And how in God's name does he get every adult in the country to spend one Saturday every month cleaning the streets? And what has the psychological impact of that been? The identity impact? The president says it's not embarrassing, it's not menial work, it's a way of expressing your loyalty to and your pride in your country. How do you change your attitudes about something that you think you know what it means? How did he pull that off?

There are lots of fascinating leaders in Latin America worth studying. But I think it's worth looking at Colombia. How has Medellín been given back to the people of Colombia? We all know President Uribe has faced criticism in the U.S., but how did Medellín go from being the drug capital of the world, one of the most dangerous places on Earth, to the host city of the 50th anniversary of the Inter-American Development Bank? I would look at that.

I would look at another guy, José Ramos-Horta, the president of the first country in the 21st century, East Timor. Is it too small to be a nation? Can you get too small? Can your courageous fight for independence and freedom lead you to an economic unit that is not going to have a population or a geographic base big enough to take care of your folks? How are the Kosovars going to avoid that?

FP: Is there any country you haven't been to yet that you want to go to?

BC: I want to go to Mongolia and ride a horse across the steppes and pretend I am in Genghis Khan's horde -- but I'm not hurting anybody! I want to go to Antarctica. There are places where I have been where I have only been working. I would like to take Hillary to climb Kilimanjaro, while there is still snow up there.

VICTORIA WILL

Kosovo Unveils Clinton Statue - NYTimes.com

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

PRISTINA (Reuters) - Kosovo's Albanian majority unveiled a statue of former U.S. president Bill Clinton on Sunday to thank him for saving them by stopping a wave of ethnic cleansing by Serbia.

As the U.S. President in 1999, Clinton launched NATO air strikes to halt the killing of ethnic Albanians by Serbian troops.

Clinton's speech was interrupted several times by Kosovo Albanians wildly cheering his name and U.S.A., and waving U.S., Albanian and Kosovo flags.

"I am profoundly grateful that I had a chance to be a part of ending the horrible things that were happening to you 10 years ago giving you a chance to build a better future for yourself," Clinton told the crowd.

The crowd chanted Clinton's name when the former president started shaking hands with people along a boulevard named after him.

"I never expected ... anywhere someone will make such a big statue of me," Clinton said after his 3-metre (10 foot) statue was unveiled.

He urged Kosovars to build a multi-ethnic country with the minority Serbs and other minorities and said the United States would always help Kosovo's people.

"You have to build something good and we should help," he added.

Kosovo declared independence from Serbia last year and was recognised by the United States and major European Union powers -- a total of 62 countries worldwide but not by its former ruler Serbia, Russia and China.

Grateful Kosovo Albanians also named a central street in central Pristina after former U.S. president George W. Bush.

Kosovo Albanians regard Clinton, former British prime minister Tony Blair and Clinton's state secretary Madeleine Albright as their saviours and have named their babies after them.

Ismail Neziri had travelled 60 km (37 miles) to see the president again after they met in a refugee camp in Macedonia where Neziri's family had fled to escape the forces of late Serb strongman Slobodan Milosevic.

Around 10,000 Albanians were killed as Serb forces moved to wipe out an ethnic Albanian guerrilla force and 800,000 were expelled to neighbouring Macedonia, Albania and Montenegro.

"I was only eight years in a refugee camp in Macedonia when Clinton took me in his hands and today he is the same big and young man," said Neziri, 18, holding a U.S. flag.

"In 1996 everybody was speaking that Clinton is a good man and he will help us and then my father named me after him," said 13-year-old Klinton Krasniqi.

(Editing by Richard Williams)

The Confessions of Bill - The New York Review of Books

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By David Bromwich

The Clinton Tapes: Wrestling History with the President

by Taylor Branch

Simon and Schuster, 707 pp., $35.00

In the fall of 1993, Taylor Branch agreed with Bill Clinton to conduct occasional interviews on tapes that would be turned into an oral chronicle of the Clinton presidency. The two had been friends more than twenty years earlier in Texas on the McGovern presidential campaign of 1972. Branch, in more recent years, had published the first volume of his trilogy on Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, and was in the middle of writing the second; the tapes, for him, would be an interruption of planned work, whereas for Clinton they promised to be a flattering record of work in progress. This inequality was balanced by the fact that Branch liked the idea of seeing the President close-up. The two resumed their friendship with ease, and, between October 1993 and March 2001, produced the seventy-nine interviews of which the present book offers a digest.

The arrangement was peculiar in one respect. Clinton kept the tapes, while Branch had to dictate impressions on tapes of his own as he drove back to Baltimore from each visit to the White House. Clinton used the originals to assist in the writing of his memoirs; at some future date, they will probably be open to scholars. This set-up means that Branch's chronicle has not a single extended quotation of Bill Clinton. A sentence every two or three pages is what we get, surrounded by dutiful and often undistinguished paragraphs of summary. Still, Branch has eyes and ears. When he can pause long enough to violate a self-denying ordinance, he also has considerable powers of analysis. Yet an unsuspecting confidence is the pervasive tone—a trust that appears to have continued beyond recorded conversations. Branch sent proofs of the book to Clinton and invited him to suggest nonsubstantive revisions.

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The sprawling summary that makes up The Clinton Tapes follows Clinton's train of associations. One conse-quence of Branch's starting well into Clinton's first year in office is a foreshortened view of the defeat of the President's first project, the legalization of gays in the military, and a minimal treatment of the launching of his second, the initiative to convert the country to a plan of universal health care. The choice of the gay issue as the first of this presidency was improbable in a way Branch does not quite seem to grasp. Though an obvious next step in toleration, it was sure to be controversial, and remote from the centrist spirit in which Clinton had run his campaign. It could be relied on to bring back the acrimonious battles of the 1980s.

David Mixner and other leaders of the gay community had advised him against taking up the cause so early. Clinton drove ahead in spite of their advice, and gave a taste of victory to enemies who would prove relentless. There would be other casualties from this early defeat. Clinton thought of appointing Senator Sam Nunn as secretary of defense in 1996, but the memory of photographs of Nunn touring a navy ship and shivering at the prospect of gay sailors in such close quarters assured a veto of his nomination by the liberal wing of the party.

On universal health care, Branch misses the drama of attrition and anti-climax by which the President's soaring commitments were abridged week by week until the concept expired. This series of capitulations was the source of many people's later suspicion that Bill Clinton was fond of the language of principle but would finally compromise on almost anything. Again, the character of his performance on health care, and his handing it to his wife to add to her luster, seemed to confirm the rumors that the President's conduct was shaded by cronyism and his demeanor slack and self-indulgent. He was said to run policymaking at the White House as a series of inspired bull sessions: an impression successfully planted by Bob Woodward in The Agenda. Branch faithfully registers Clinton's irritation at that partial portrait and, without exactly refuting it, convinces us that the reality was far more intricate. He quotes Clinton saying later that he should have "started with a small piece of health reform" and been content to profit from whatever public good might follow.

About the time Branch settled into his irregular White House routine, the President was considering the appointment of a politician to the Supreme Court. He wanted to break the solid streak of lawyers and judges. Mario Cuomo, Bruce Babbitt, and, in the following year, George Mitchell were all seriously considered, but Cuomo turned it down; Babbitt, after a tantalizing pause, was told that his regional influence was needed at the Department of the Interior; and Mitchell withdrew his name out of loyalty to the President's need for Democratic numbers in the Senate.

Meanwhile, Clinton already found himself dogged by old enemies from Arkansas. He was sure the Whitewater controversy would die down since there was nothing to the charges. But Cliff Jackson and Sheffield Nelson, "both of whom," Branch says, had "turned from Democrats to failed Republican candidates" in Arkansas, had time on their hands and a shot at getting their names in the papers. "They don't have anything else going in their lives," said Clinton, "but trying to bring me down." He surrendered early to the demand for an independent prosecutor because he felt so secure about the innocuousness of the case. This was a large misjudgment. He had underestimated the malice, the wildness, and the persistence of his enemies. These portents coincided with the emergence of Newt Gingrich and his Contract with America—a gimmick whose crude appeal to an old anti- federalism brought a midterm Republican takeover of both houses of Congress in November 1994.

That Clinton was able to ride out that storm was the first convincing show of his mastery. The bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, also served as a reminder to the more genteel of his accusers that the pleasure of hating Clinton made for a sport that could go over the edge. The virulence of the anti-government forces of that time is brought out by Branch's recollections here: even Clinton's statements after Oklahoma City on the importance of respect for government were widely taken to be one more piece of opportunism. And once the grimness of the event was absorbed, the Republicans in Congress held hearings not on Oklahoma City but on the abuse of federal power in the FBI assault on the Branch Davidians at Waco.

Taylor Branch admires Clinton within reason, but when there are two sides to an argument he is apt to see things from Clinton's point of view. He conveys well the vituperative rage of the Republicans at Clinton's theft of their "small is better" programs and the anti-government rhetoric that had been their sole argumentative resource. The climactic episode here was the repeal of much of the welfare system and the substitution of work requirements: a decision on which Branch comments too briefly. The rejection of welfare precipitated, as Clinton knew it would, a break with veterans of the civil rights movement, such as Marion Wright Edelman, who had been his friends for two decades. When Clinton reversed his liberal commitments, he found high-sounding reasons to do so, as well as one good party reason: it would take the issue away from the Republicans forever. But no one doubted at the time that he did it to buy insurance for the 1996 election, which he was already favored to win. This fact Branch does not omit but plays down.

Of Russia in the early years of his presidency, as of Bosnia and Kosovo in the later years, little is heard in Branch's summary of the tapes. It is rare to see a show of passion from the President away from domestic policy. Yet Clinton flares with anger when he thinks about Saddam Hussein—a puzzling contrast (as Branch portrays it) with his almost genial acceptance of the tyranny of Suharto. The leader of Iraq is the only person in these pages whom Clinton will be heard to say he hates. He hates him, Clinton says, for what he has done to his people. Yet there is something heartless in Clinton's own remarks about the deaths of Iraqi civilians in the botched American missile attack of June 26, 1993. He had ordered the bombing of Iraqi intelligence headquarters in retaliation for a supposed plot against the life of George H.W. Bush; three of twenty-three Tomahawk cruise missiles went astray and killed Iraqis who lived nearby. "I regret the loss of life," Clinton tells Branch for the record. "His tone was wooden and mechanical," Branch comments, "with barely a trace of feeling, but he repeated the phrase several times." A similar tone of calculation is audible as Clinton considers the politics of an American operation to restore the govern- ment of Jean-Bertrand Aristide in Haiti. "When the first soldier dies, I'm a dead duck."

Clinton was baffled by the press coverage that made his smallest move appear drenched in cynicism and his remotest associations corrupt or devious. Reports like those by Jeff Gerth in The New York Times on Whitewater and later on Wen Ho Lee, the alleged smuggler of nuclear secrets—sensational exposures that would come to be largely discredited—were damaging to the minimal reputation for probity without which a politician cannot be trusted to act. Clinton saw the Times and The Washington Post as the heart of the problem. By their pursuit of scandals, they gave permission to the tabloids lower down the ladder, and he said with some justice: "I think these papers have corrupted themselves over Whitewater." The reporters and columnists alike made the most of any hint of purposeful alliance between the President and his wife. They were no less satisfied to transmit the slightest suggestion of marital discord.

Branch's record suggests that the political intelligence shared by Bill and Hillary Clinton was perhaps more interesting and flexible than either separately commands. The American press lacked the wit for a single reporter to discover this; yet it comes out unmistakably in several interludes of The Clinton Tapes. Consider Hillary's account (on her way to bed) of a day's business in the health care debate, where a surgeon has testified that government does nothing to assist Medicare. "She and the president," writes Branch, "completed each other's sentences in a chortling spoof of doctrinaire contradictions in medical policy." One of them trots out the slogan that "no American could be denied quality health care," and the other adds, "but no one was required to pay." The Clintons enjoyed each other's quickness and shared a familiar scorn for time-wasters.

The establishment press ended by finding Bill Clinton not so much elusive as empty. His wife's political ambition, as shown by her run for the Senate in 2000, and the sympathy with which he worked to advance it were taken as proof of a quality somehow worse than ambition in himself. What could that be? At this distance, it is barely possible to reconstruct the grounds for the continuous heat of jeering sarcasm that issued from Howell Raines, William Safire, and Maureen Dowd at the Times, and from Len Downie, Sally Quinn, and David Broder at the Post. The lightheaded meanness of the attitude carried over to their disdain for Gore in 2000, and influenced a jocular acceptance of Bush. This was true not only of the credulity toward the Whitewater charges and Paula Jones, but regarding smaller scandals as well, from the firing of agents at the White House travel office to the false rumor of vandalism by the Clinton staff on their departure in 2001.

The mood of the press was contagious: it was taken up by Louis Freeh at the FBI and led, in the worst miscarriage of all the crowd of accusations, to the indictment by a special prosecutor of Henry Cisneros, secretary of housing and urban development, for eighteen felonies, including conspiracy, perjury, and obstruction of justice. The prosecutor there would end by settling for a guilty plea on a single misdemeanor; but the career of Cisneros had been effectively stopped.

As for the Paula Jones civil suit, Judge Susan Wright ruled, as Branch reminds us, on April 1, 1998, that Jones "had no case for sexual harassment even under her version of the facts." The Republicans went ahead with impeachment, unembarrassed. Once they had Monica Lewinsky in their sights, they calculated that salacious curiosity would stir up energy sufficient to cover the flimsiness of Jones's legal case. At this late date, Clinton's friends were still anxious on his behalf about Whitewater, but he was unworried. "If Starr had gleaned even a pea-shooter's case from those thickets," Clinton said, "it would have been fired long ago." His view was hardly disinterested, but his verdict on the investigations is impossible to dispute: "I trusted the press. I trusted the Congress. I trusted the courts. And I was wrong on all counts."

Yet through all that hunt of obloquy, Bill Clinton was strangely passive. Maybe, in 1997, when Branch reports having found him abstracted and reticent, Clinton was taking the measure of his enemies and wondering whether his lapse with a White House intern would eventually lend the other charges a post facto credibility. But on the whole, it seems fairest to see Clinton's preference for cunning over aggression as part of a temperamental adaptability. If this was a weakness, it went with his most basic appetite. "He loved politics so much," Branch sums up, "that he could speak almost fondly of his own defeats."

This made Clinton sometimes emollient beyond what was required by the occasion. He commiserated, for example, with Yitzhak Rabin, during the Oslo process, about how hard it must be for an Israeli soldier to talk to Yasser Arafat. Rabin had no need for such a show of concern. "After all," he told Clinton, "we don't need to make peace with our friends." Clinton himself was always forgiving when he saw an enemy on the point of becoming a friend. He was tickled by a letter he received, in early days at the White House, from Richard Nixon about Russia. Clinton pronounced it "brilliant" and was moved to praise Nixon extravagantly at his funeral.

Clinton's Middle Class Bill of Rights—featuring tax deductions for education—was proposed in December 1994 to counter his midterm defeat; it was a step too far in conciliation for Branch. And as he records, Clinton himself expressed contempt for the bright idea even as he wielded it. Mixed with that feeling must have been also a trace of self-contempt. Branch here reports a rare intervention. He told the President that the idea was nothing but pandering—"seducing voters to feel good by running down the government." Clinton replied bitterly that

the voters were sovereign.... They were the boss. He would give them what they wanted, even if it was stupid.... He would imitate Republican salesmanship to give the voters a borrowed gift. To do so, he would make middle-class tax cuts the centerpiece of his legislative program [in 1995].

In this case, as in Clinton's refusal to hit back against Jesse Helms after Helms said the President would not be safe on any army base in North Carolina, Branch thought that Clinton made a misjudgment in trying to strike an attitude above the battle. Yet Clinton was capable in fact of speaking with affection even about Helms. He enjoyed rapprochements with Robert Dole, Trent Lott, Alan Simpson, and others who "poisoned in jest" as part of everyday politics. They, in turn, marveled at Clinton's ability to absorb blows, come off the ropes, and win the next round in an unspectacular way.

A certain fatigue with Clinton's view of things may set in, three of four hundred pages into the Tapes, when one realizes that he estimates half the public persons in the world as politicians. It is hard to imagine another president saying of Pope John Paul II, after seeing him fetch applause from a crowd: "I sure as hell would hate to be running against him for mayor anywhere." But Clinton simply had an unreserved love of the game of politics. This made it possible for him to respect Fritz Hollings's mordant attack on his attempt to cook up drum rolls and little fanfares of "bipartisanship" over balancing the budget. As Branch relates Clinton's own appreciative summary:

We Democrats, Hollings nearly shouted, did all the heavy lifting back in 1993 without a single Republican vote in either chamber of Congress. Fidelity to that measure had eliminated 77 percent of the deficit already, by his calculation, with the remainder soon to be wiped out whether they adopted a five-year agreement or not. So why on earth would Clinton share any credit with Republicans? Did he remember summoning Democrats to walk the plank for this? How could any president spit on their sacrifice and uphold the party cohesion to survive? Was he running a political charity.

It is an earnest voice, and candid, the voice of a fighter who knows that it is honorable to hold a grudge against a scoundrel. It is the very tone that people always missed in Clinton himself.

Branch is scrupulous in noting his worries about whether he may have gotten too close to his subject. He was right to turn down Clinton's request that he become a friendly in-house historian, much as Arthur Schlesinger Jr. had been for President Kennedy. True, Branch stepped in from the sidelines to assist Clinton with communications that might lead to the bloodless return of Jean-Bertrand Aristide to Haiti. Branch was a close friend of Aristide. But this is hardly an impediment to accurate reporting, and the narrative of the resolution of the Haiti crisis in 1994 is memorable for one significant detail: the irritation Clinton felt toward Jimmy Carter, which soon turned to gratitude for Carter's role in assuring the exiled president's safe passage home.

In commoner exchanges over Clinton's work as president, a conventional note of pride of association clouds Branch's judgment only once. He is greatly concerned in 1997 that Clinton should do more than promise (in a dozen insipid variations) a "bridge to the twenty-first century." In the end, Branch gets one of his own sentences into the second inaugural: "Guided by the ancient vision of a promised land, let us set our sights upon a land of new promise." Looking at it now, he must recognize that it could pass for a sentence spoken by Lyndon Johnson or Ronald Reagan.

The last hundred pages are the best of The Clinton Tapes. Maybe Clinton in his final year in office spoke more easily; in any case, the narrative has a sharper focus now, and the anecdotes fall into a characteristic rhythm:

The president was eating a bowl of bran in January. He said Bob Squier, the campaign consultant, never had a colonoscopy in his life. They diagnosed him six months ago, and he died today at sixty-five. The end comes on quickly if you don't catch it early. "I always eat bran when a friend dies of colon cancer," Clinton said.

Two subjects dominate the last several interviews: the conclusion of the impeachment and the Camp David negotiations on Palestine between Ehud Barak and Arafat. Clinton seems to have been more optimistic about his chances for acquittal than about the possibility of brokering an honest peace between Israel and Palestine. In July 2000, he is unusually reluctant, for reasons that are obscure, to speak at all about the negotiations. The reason may lie partly in accusations of anti-Semitism suffered a few months earlier by Hillary Clinton in her Senate campaign. Such pressures work in complex ways; and the want of analysis by Branch is disappointing; but he gives enough material for others to work on.

As far back as Benjamin Netanyahu's campaign to become prime minister in 1996, Clinton had been fearful of the mixing of the politics of the United States and Israel; in February of that year, he spoke of Netanyahu as someone who

opposed the peace alliance on both sides of the Atlantic. While he legitimately attacked Peres in the Israeli campaign—emphasizing the danger of potential concessions to Syria—his Likud agents in the United States joined Republicans eager to stir up suspicions against Clinton's Middle East diplomacy.... [Clinton] called it scandalous electioneering by and with a foreign political party.

Branch's account of the fraying negotiations between Barak and Arafat contains an unexpected comment by Clinton about his final attempt to get an agreement in December 2000. Clinton put forward his proposal for a deal—accepted by Israel, rejected by Arafat—which would give "94–96" percent of the West Bank to the new Palestinian state. A generous offer, irrationally spurned, it might appear, yet Clinton came to think in retrospect that

Barak misplayed it. Who could say for sure, because the signals were so coded and circumscribed on all three sides? Still, those last terms presented by Clinton should have made Barak say no. They were too hard for Israel. They went too far on the territories and Jerusalem. Then perhaps Arafat could say yes to the terms that had made Israel balk. Only then might Barak have closed the deal by changing his mind....

Barak said yes too fast, Clinton feared. He had nothing left to give, and Arafat's instinct when offered 100 percent was to demand 120.... In all their pirouettes, they should have found a way to let the head of a functioning state make the last concession, or look like it, anyway.

About the aim and object of Clinton's conduct in the negotiations—at a period that the Gaza onslaught has rendered almost unimaginable—Branch leaves nothing finally clear. It is an exaggeration to say that a map of a country (however autonomous) so checked and split was 100 percent of what Arafat had dared to hope for. Yet Clinton's perception of the dialectic by which, in a negotiation between unequal powers, the stronger must not be seen either to back off austerely or to jump forward too quickly, shows the acuteness that made his political insight a ponderable force to the end. The unhappy truth is that many of his best thoughts are afterthoughts. It will take a later historian to compare the possible correlations between Clinton's waning influence as an outgoing president, Hillary Clinton's campaign in New York, Barak's late move to rescind his offer of the Golan Heights to Syria, and Arafat's eventual rejection of the offer of contiguous and substantial territories on the West Bank.

How was Clinton able at once to govern and to observe, with a semblance of detachment, the trial that almost drove him out of the presidency? A mood of oppression may sometimes be detected in the tapes made during the impeachment; but even then his spirits veer upward to gallows humor and a strange sort of exhilaration. "Surreal" is Branch's word for the fact that the President's approval ratings stayed above 60 percent even as impeachment was voted and the argument about details of the charges began to build.

Clinton at this time would say for the record: "I am utterly convinced that history will vindicate me, and will record that my opponents have damaged the country." Truer to the man and his love of the game is an incident that makes the most memorable tableau in the book. Clinton is talking on the phone, hearing that his approval ratings have stayed high, and proclaiming his "merry wish to keep the impeachment trial going another month." But why? Heavy contributions from small donors are coming to the Democratic Party as never before; Clinton continues on the phone with the DNC chair, Steve Grossman, and remarks on the side to Branch: "I will be very surprised, and crushed, if we do not win the House of Representatives in 2000."

In his last sessions, Bill Clinton wished that Al Gore had waged a less decorous campaign in 2000, and not run away from Clinton's record. His view here is self-serving but also canny. Had he been allowed to campaign for Gore, he might indeed have helped him to win New Hampshire, Tennessee, and Arkansas. He also shared the common judgment that Gore was wrong to let his people concentrate on a few disputed jurisdictions in Florida; a recount of the legal votes in the entire state would have carried a surer mark of conviction. Speaking on November 27, 2000, Clinton asserted his view that

the US Supreme Court would do anything it could to help Bush. He wasn't sure how the justices could get a legal foothold, but he said they were political enough to engineer a conservative president in order to perpetuate justices like themselves.... In summary, President Clinton said all the major institutional forces were lined up behind Bush, except for the Florida Supreme Court. He specifically included the media. Therefore, it would be very difficult for Gore to win.

This prediction Branch calls "prophetic." It was certainly correct in its estimate of the alignment of forces and in its inference of the result.

In North Korea, Clinton Helped Unveil a Mystery

By MARK LANDLER and MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON — The visit was arranged under a veil of secrecy with the help of an unlikely broker: a high-level American intelligence officer who spent much of his career trying to unlock the mysteries of North Korea.

When former President Bill Clinton landed in Pyongyang on Aug. 4 to win the release of two imprisoned American journalists, senior officials said he met an unexpectedly spry North Korean leader, Kim Jong-il, who welcomed him with a long dinner that night, even proposing to stay up afterward.

Mr. Kim was flanked by two longtime aides, and he gave no hint that North Korea was in the throes of a succession struggle, despite the widespread questions over how long he might live.

Mr. Clinton and the Obama administration were determined not to extend a public-relations coup to Mr. Kim, who expressed a desire for better relations with the United States. But the visit is already setting off ripples that could change the tenor of the relationship between the United States and North Korea.

On Wednesday, diplomats from North Korea plan to visit Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico with an undisclosed agenda, a senior administration official said Tuesday. Like Mr. Clinton, Mr. Richardson has traveled to Pyongyang to negotiate the release of Americans held there, in his case in the mid-1990s.

The White House approved the visit, which the official said did not signal any movement toward the resumption of official talks with North Korea and the United States. But the meeting, which he said the North Koreans requested, comes on the heels of conciliatory gestures toward South Korea, and suggests a concerted effort on the part of the North.

Mr. Clinton steered clear of broader issues during his humanitarian mission, officials said. Indeed, he did not even ask to see Mr. Kim, requesting instead a meeting with “an appropriate official.” To help the former president in case something went awry, the White House recommended John Podesta, an adviser to both Mr. Clinton and President Obama, join his delegation.

And to ensure he would not leave empty-handed, Mr. Clinton asked that a member of his entourage meet with the journalists, Laura Ling and Euna Lee, shortly after he landed to make sure they were safe, said a senior administration official, who had been briefed on the visit.

For all the billions of dollars a year that the United States spends on intelligence gathering about mysterious and unpredictable countries like North Korea, it took just 20 hours on the ground in Pyongyang by a former president to give the Obama administration its first detailed look into a nuclear-armed nation that looms as one of its greatest foreign threats.

The details about Mr. Clinton’s visit came from interviews with multiple government officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

On Tuesday, Mr. Clinton went to the White House to brief Mr. Obama and his top aides about the trip. Even before the 40-minute session in the Situation Room, Mr. Clinton had spoken to the president by phone and briefed his national security adviser, Gen. James L. Jones.

But the meeting was rich in symbolism, and the president invited Mr. Clinton to the Oval Office to talk further. The White House said little about what the men discussed, beyond noting that Mr. Obama had wanted to thank Mr. Clinton for winning the release of Ms. Ling and Ms. Lee.

The role of the intelligence officer, Joseph R. DeTrani, in arranging the visit, has not previously been reported. Mr. DeTrani is the government’s senior officer responsible for collecting and analyzing intelligence on North Korea. His efforts to pave the way for Mr. Clinton’s visit offer a glimpse into how the administration has been forced to use unorthodox methods to overcome the lack of formal communications.

During the Bush administration, when the United States was in still in talks with North Korea, the White House did not use intelligence officers for these purposes, an official familiar with the talks said. Indeed, before taking the job of North Korea mission manager in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in 2006, Mr. DeTrani served as the special envoy to the six-party talks with North Korea.

More than anything else, senior officials said, Mr. Clinton’s visit served to clear up some of the shadows surrounding Kim Jong-il’s health. After suffering a stroke last year, he looked frail in photos, spurring questions about who might replace him.

Those questions have not gone away, officials said, but they may recede a bit after Mr. Clinton’s visit. So, too, may the speculation about internal battles, given the apparent good standing of Kim Kye-gwan, the chief nuclear negotiator, and another foreign policy official, Kang Sok-ju, who also took part in the meetings.

The former president did not engage in a substantive discussion about North Korea’s nuclear program. Nor did the North Korean leader give Mr. Clinton any indication that his nation would relinquish its nuclear ambitions — a condition the United States has set for resuming negotiations, officials said.

During his one-hour meeting, officials said, Mr. Clinton advised the North Korean that he could win favor with South Korea and Japan by resolving cases of their citizens who had been abducted by North Korea. The dinner, which lasted over two hours, was “chitchat,” the official said. “It was not substantive.”

North Korea has sent other conciliatory signals. Kim Jong-il met last week with the head of a South Korean conglomerate and agreed to restart several tourism ventures, which allow people from the South to visit the North. North Korea said it would also allow reunions of Korean families divided by the border. Also, Yonhap, the South Korean news agency, said Wednesday the North would send a delegation to the funeral of Kim Dae-jung, a former president of the South.

It is not clear whether the overtures represent a change of heart or a growing desperation for money, as the North comes under increasingly strict United Nations sanctions. The White House says it is determined not to ease the pressure. In a deliberate bit of timing, it dispatched a senior diplomat, Philip S. Goldberg, to Asia on Tuesday to discuss ways to enforce the sanctions.

Still, officials and analysts said, Mr. Clinton’s visit was valuable, largely because North Korea is so opaque. Victor Cha, a top North Korea adviser in the Bush administration, said, “The Clinton trip has got a lot of people rethinking and reassessing.”

Jeff Zeleny contributed reporting.

N. Korea Releases U.S. Journalists

By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 5, 2009 



North Korea pardoned and released two detained American journalists after former president Bill Clinton met in Pyongyang on Tuesday with the country's ailing dictator, a transaction that gives Kim Jong Il a thin slice of the international legitimacy that has long eluded him.
Although the White House and the State Department steadfastly insisted that the former president -- the husband of Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton -- was on a "private humanitarian mission," the trip came about only after weeks of back-channel conversations involving academics, congressional figures, and senior White House and State Department officials, said sources involved in the planning.
North Korea rejected the administration's first choice for the trip -- former vice president Al Gore, who co-founded the television channel that employs the journalists -- and Bill Clinton left the United States only after North Korea provided assurances that the reporters would be released, the sources said.
U.S. officials said they hoped Clinton's trip would give Kim a face-saving way to end North Korea's provocative actions, such as recent missile launches and a second nuclear test, and begin the process of returning to the negotiating table on its nuclear programs. The American effort also appears to have been aided by South Korea's government, which in recent weeks has sought to ease tensions with its neighbor.
In Pyongyang, the official Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) reported that the release of Laura Ling, 32, and Euna Lee, 36, was ordered after Kim issued a "special pardon." The two had been sentenced to 12 years of hard labor after they were captured in March near the Chinese border while making a documentary about the trafficking of North Korean women to China.
The journalists and Clinton left North Korea on a plane en route to Los Angeles, where the women were to be reunited with their families.
"Clinton expressed words of sincere apology to Kim Jong Il for the hostile acts committed by the two American journalists," KCNA reported. "Clinton courteously conveyed to Kim Jong Il an earnest request of the U.S. government to leniently pardon them."
U.S. officials denied late Tuesday night that any apology was offered.
During the visit, Kim hosted a banquet in Clinton's honor, and U.S. officials said the men held talks that lasted more than three hours. State media broadcast images showing a dour-looking Clinton and a smiling Kim. And the KCNA report summarizing the trip was remarkably positive, speaking of "building the bilateral confidence" and "improving the relations between the two countries."
Ling and Lee were in many ways pawns in a test of wills between North Korea and the United States. After their sentencing in June, North Korea reportedly kept them in a guesthouse near Pyongyang, allowing them to make occasional phone calls to relatives in the United States. The sentence to hard labor was not carried out.
North Korea had long made it clear that it expected a high-profile visit on behalf of the journalists, but Gore may not have been acceptable because he was viewed as their boss and thus not an appropriate symbol of the United States. Other potential envoys considered by the administration included Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson (D) and a former ambassador to South Korea, Donald Gregg.
The discreet discussions to secure the women's release continued even as Hillary Clinton slammed North Korea last month, saying it had "no friends" and was acting like an unruly child. But in critical ways, she also moderated her tone with regard to the case, moving from declaring in June that the charges were "absolutely without merit or foundation" to saying last month that the journalists "are deeply regretful, and we are very sorry it's happened."
Some officials said the success of former president Clinton's trip could result in the first U.S.-North Korea bilateral meeting of the Obama administration. They also think the United States will have a somewhat stronger hand because China for the first time has backed tougher sanctions in the wake of North Korea's May nuclear test.
No government officials appeared to be aboard Clinton's plane, but the nature of the delegation gave the mission a quasi-official status. It included John Podesta, Clinton's White House chief of staff, who served as chief of Obama's transition team and is president of the Center for American Progress. Also seen in photos released by the Korean media were David Straub, a former head of the Korea desk at the State Department who is now at Stanford University; longtime Clinton aide Douglas J. Band; and Justin Cooper, who has worked with the William J. Clinton Foundation.
It is not clear who funded the trip. News of Podesta's role came as a surprise to staffers at the Center for American Progress; he was thought to be on vacation in Truckee, Calif. Colleagues of Straub's at Stanford were also surprised.
Clinton and his party were greeted early Tuesday at an airport in Pyongyang, the capital, by Yang Hyong Sop, vice president of the presidium of the Supreme People's Assembly, and by Vice Foreign Minister Kim Kye Gwan, according to KCNA. Kim is the chief nuclear negotiator for North Korea, suggesting that Pyongyang hoped to use the visit to make progress on the impasse over its nuclear weapons program.
The visit offered the United States its first direct look at the increasingly frail-looking Kim Jong Il, 67, who is thought to have suffered a stroke a year ago and whose health has triggered speculation that he has picked his third son to take over Asia's only communist dynasty.
"One of the most beneficial things that could come of this is that smart American observers can describe how sharp he is, how lucid he sounds," said Robert Carlin, a former U.S. intelligence analyst who has made nearly 30 visits to North Korea and is dubious about reports of a succession crisis. "It might put to rest a lot of garbage rumors."
The most senior U.S. official previously to have met Kim was then-Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright in 2000, who traveled to Pyongyang aiming to arrange a presidential visit by Clinton. That visit did not take place as he turned his concentration to faltering Israeli-Palestinian peace talks in the waning days of his presidency. "The visit that never happened has now happened," said a source involved in the talks with North Korea, noting that the meeting could help fill a gap in Kim's perceived legacy.
Special correspondent Stella Kim in Seoul, correspondent Blaine Harden in Seattle and staff writer Garance Franke-Ruta in Washington contributed to this report.