Adventures in Correspondentland (8 page)

Before an ecumenical crowd of some 2000 sixth-formers drawn from Protestant and Catholic schools, Bono belted out the song with marvellous passion. (My most treasured souvenir from my time in Northern Ireland is a bootleg recording of his performance.) Then he introduced the bespectacled middle-aged politicians who had done more than any others to bring Northern Ireland to this point – of ‘taking a leap of faith out of the past and into the future', as Bono put it.

Two more unfashionable politicians it was hard to imagine than the highly strung David Trimble or the podgy John Hume, but they made their awkward entrances from either side of the stage and then clasped hands in the middle. To appear more up-to-the-minute, both men had discarded their suit jackets, though not their ties, while David Trimble even cracked a smile. Bono had also made his own sartorial adjustment. Normally, he appeared in rose-tinted spectacles, but this time he came on stage without any sunglasses. Predicting a bright and brilliant future, he presumably wanted everyone to see his eyes.

The ‘No' campaign was quick to condemn the concert, complaining that U2 was trying to buy the votes of young people with a free concert. Ian Paisley also claimed that, during one concert in America, Bono had set fire to the Union Flag – an accusation that the singer rejected vehemently. Yet, at a time when the late momentum was with opponents of the Good Friday Agreement, this south-of-the-border superstar gave the ‘Yes' campaign the fillip it desperately needed: a late reminder that peace was hip and trendy, and that it meant Bono more than Michael Stone.

Just three days later, in the highest attended poll since partition, 71 per cent of people in Northern Ireland voted ‘Yes' to the Good Friday Agreement. In the Irish Republic, where the country's constitution penned by Éamon De Valera would soon be rewritten to drop its claim on the north, over 94 per cent voted in favour. When Ian Paisley arrived at King's Hall in Belfast – the agricultural showground where the result was announced – he was met by Loyalist chants of ‘Cheerio, cheerio, cheerio'. Paisley represented the sectarian politics of ‘No'. For once, Ulster had said ‘Yes'.

Later that night, the ‘Yes' campaign hosted a strangely lifeless victory party in a rooftop bar with mauve lighting, panoramic views of the city and lukewarm Pinot Gris. But there was much better
craic
to be had at the BBC Club, just over the way from the newsroom, which was the scene of an almighty booze-up. Whatever they thought of the agreement, journalists celebrated the simple joy of having, for the first time in 30 years, a much more hopeful storyline to impart.

With Guinness, Harp lager and whisky – Bushmills for the Protestants and Jameson for the Catholics, not that it seemed to matter so much any more – we partied all night, and then, when dawn came, partied some more. Less than three months later, these same journalists would cover the massacre at Omagh, when dissident Republicans killed 29 people, many of them Catholic, after detonating a car bomb in a street packed with shoppers. It was Northern Ireland's worst single atrocity. Yet so strong was the sense of public revulsion that the hope also was that Omagh would become the last. For once, the Real IRA was even humiliated into an apology.

In the BBC Club, perhaps the home-town journalists had
another cause for celebration: their newsroom would no longer have to accommodate over-ambitious blow-ins from London who had been heading to Belfast since the late-1960s in the hope of making a name for themselves. One of the biggest changes during my time in the BBC is also one of the most welcome: young tyro reporters are no longer blooded in Northern Ireland. Admittedly, it had taken longer than that gentle landlady had predicted, but comfort had come, by and large, to the streets of Belfast.

The end of the Troubles; the sudden death of England's most glorious rose; the assassination of Israel's favourite son: at a time when the requirements of continuous news turned big stories into mega-stories, I had the good fortune to cover three of them very early on. And, as if in a game of consequences, my luck held. On the return flight to Washington, after attending Rabin's state funeral, the then house speaker Newt Gingrich was so enraged that President Clinton declined to speak to him aboard Air Force One on the flight back from Israel that it contributed to his decision to starve the federal bureaucracy of congressional funding. This led directly to the government shutdown in late-1995 and early-1996, which in turn meant that Clinton came to rely more heavily on the team of White House interns, since regular staffers were not allowed to show up for work. One in particular caught his eye. She was a 21-year-old from Beverly Hills. Her name was Monica Samille Lewinsky.

What luck in those early years of my nascent career to have a guardian angel with lax morals, a chaotic personality, an appetite for everything and, better still, presidential ambitions. As a student journalist, the first story I ever managed to get published by a newspaper in London was about Governor Bill Clinton. It was a trifling diary item about a bar in Little Rock called Slick Willie, his then nickname, which had come up with a range of cocktails to mark his run for the White House – although even then the press was showing more interest in his penchant for Arkansas cocktail waitresses.

Six years later, as a young BBC reporter, President William Jefferson Clinton landed me my first permanent foreign posting, when scandal once more engulfed him, and we discovered that his taste in women now extended to voluptuous White House interns.

During the impeachment saga, it was often said that cameramen who had amassed vast sums of overtime pay splurged it on motor cruisers and small yachts on the Potomac or at Chesapeake Bay, which they inevitably christened
Monica
. Had the BBC paid its correspondents piece rates, I would have hurled the champagne towards the hull of a vessel named
Bill
or, perhaps,
Just William
. That diary story not only gave me the pleasure of seeing my work
appear for the first time in print but also got me my start as a high-society gossip columnist. The Lewinsky scandal – though it should truly have been called the Bill Clinton scandal – made me a Washington correspondent. It was a job I had coveted from the time I realised I was not about to become the next Le Corbusier, turned my back on architecture and switched instead to studying American political history.

To meet him, of course, is to be exposed immediately to the Clinton Treatment: the mauling handshake; the empathetic nod; the piercing stare, fixed and admiring; the instant intimacy; a gravitational pull with the power to suck people into his orbit. Often, it is said that Clinton comes not only with his own force field but also his own personal weather system, and that he's so expert at the art of seduction that he can make even the most fleeting acquaintance feel as if he or she is the single most important person in the room. Still, when I first encountered him during the 1992 New Hampshire primary campaign I came away thinking there was something much more transactional about his celebrated interpersonal skills. The feeling was of being the most important voter in the room, or, in my case, the most important journalist.

I was over from Oxford at the time conducting research for my thesis on Jack Kennedy, a leader with whom Clinton was intermittently compared. I was trying to persuade him to agree to a short interview for his old university rag. Always obliging, the one-time Rhodes Scholar did not need much cajoling and suggested I contact his chief of staff in Little Rock, Betsey Wright, the sorter of his details, the keeper of his secrets and the freewheeling aide immortalised by the actress Kathy Bates in the movie
Primary Colors
. For a top-ranking aide in the midst of a presidential
campaign, Wright could hardly have been more helpful. However, a candidate's time is not only donor money but also votes, and it was impossible for her to find a gap in his schedule, since there weren't any gaps in the first place.

So when next I ran into Clinton, I tried once again. This time, he was outside the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in south Boston, where I spent my days poring over yellowing presidential papers in an archive that assassination-conspiracy theorists were convinced was bugged, and where the governor had gone for a posthumous character reference. Already, his campaign had published a black-and-white photograph taken when he was 17, looking preternaturally self-possessed as he shook the hand of JFK on the South Lawn of the White House – the Clinton handshake was a marvel even then – and took command of the small talk, as if Kennedy was merely house-sitting.

Before Clinton levered himself into his people mover, which in those early days could comfortably accommodate both his campaign staff and travelling press corps, he once again agreed in principle to the interview and suggested I badger Wright. As before, the governor seemed genuinely enthusiastic about the idea, although I had seen enough of him by now to recognise that this was his stock response to any idea put to him while trying to harvest votes.

Nothing if not persistent, I made my third approach at a campaign rally in a downtown Boston hotel, when I tried to corner Clinton in one of those narrow, back-of-house corridors favoured by presidential candidates needing to make a fast escape from the balloon-strewn ballroom, via the kitchen, to their waiting limousine. This time, I had even brought a snapper, a college friend studying photography who was happy to play the
role of paparazzo. Perhaps Clinton felt he was being ambushed, since gone now was the easy charm of our first two encounters, and absent was his outstretched hand. Instead, the mere mention of the word ‘Oxford', which had always been my best calling card, seemed to instil a sense of near panic in both him and his handlers.

As the governor was bundled out of a back entrance, it seemed my chances of landing an interview had vanished as well, and I left thinking the presence of the photographer had blown my chances. Yet, a few days later, the headlines offered a very different explanation. As a student at University College, Oxford, Clinton had managed to avoid being conscripted for Vietnam, through a combination of political contacts and the luck of drawing a high lottery number in the draft. Now that reporters had caught a whiff of the story, he no longer wanted his varsity days revisited.

With the then New York governor Mario Cuomo having declared himself a non-runner, Clinton had started the year well out in front in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. Already, he had won the money primary by attracting the wealthiest donors. He had also achieved something of a landslide victory in the media primary, by winning over opinion-forming writers, such as Joe Klein of
New York
magazine, who wrote the first draft of the invented narrative of the campaign. But then came the moral primary, after the first bimbo eruptions started to explode on the front pages of the supermarket tabloids. They arrived not with pyrotechnics but peroxide, for the allegations of infidelity centred on Gennifer Flowers, the bottle-blonde cocktail waitress who claimed to have had a 12-year romance with Clinton. At her kiss-and-tell-all press conference, Flowers played a recording of a phone conversation with the governor in which he purportedly urged her to deny
their affair. But her appearance that day lives in the memory for her embarrassed reticence in response to what is possibly the most tacky question ever uttered during a presidential campaign: ‘Did Mr Clinton use a condom?'

With even papers like
The New York Times
and
The Washington Post
lapsing into British-tabloid-style sensationalism, the governor took an immediate hit in the polls. Then he managed to temporarily right himself by appearing in his famed
Sixty Minutes
interview on Super Bowl Sunday, when, with Hillary sitting dutifully by his side, he implicitly acknowledged his infidelity. The draft-dodging story, however, threatened to be terminal, since, with seven out of the past eight US presidents having served in the Second World War, Americans still expected their commanders-in-chief to have worn dog tags. Even more worrying for the scandal-prone Clinton was that the aura of inevitability around his candidacy had evaporated. His response was the melancholic cry ‘I'm electable', though a dwindling number of reporters believed him.

On the plus side, the scandal led to the publication of an anguished 1400-word letter which the then 23-year-old Clinton had written from Oxford to a colonel in Arkansas explaining his opposition to the Vietnam War. It had plumbed ‘a depth of feeling I had reserved solely for racism in America', he said, and fuelled a belief that no government ‘rooted in limited, parliamentary democracy should have the power to make its citizens fight and kill in a war they may oppose'.

For his admirers, the letter demonstrated not only a powerful intellect but also his skill at elucidating the most complicated of issues. On the negative side of the ledger, however, it provided damning clues about the extent to which his character was so
completely riven with politics even in his youth. ‘I decided to accept the draft in spite of my beliefs for one reason,' Clinton offered as the sole explanation for finally putting his name forward, ‘to maintain my political viability within the system.'

In those final manic weeks of the New Hampshire primary, I had actually signed up as a volunteer for the Clinton campaign, though I suspect it was less out of admiration for the governor and more because his bus left for Nashua, New Hampshire, on Saturday mornings an hour after those laid on by his main rivals, Paul Tsongas and Bob Kerrey. For my then girlfriend, who also made the trip north from Boston, it was the start of a celebrated career in the Clinton campaign, which took her all the way to a desk in the policy-shop just down the corridor from the famed War Room in Little Rock, Arkansas, where James Carville, the ‘ragin' cajun', barked out orders and refused to change his lucky underwear. Alas, my involvement started and ended on the same day, after withdrawing my services in a fit of self-righteous pique.

At that stage, the draft-dodging allegations had not yet come to the fore, but they were of little concern. After all, the national obsession with Vietnam, like the fixation with student pot smoking, was discouraging some of America's most talented baby boomers from seeking high office – especially when combined with the puritanical streak of American journalists and their refusal to impose any statute of limitation on scandal. Nor was I concerned with Clinton's mutually consensual infidelities (back then, the allegations of non-mutually-consensual infidelities with Juanita Broaddrick and Kathleen Willey had not yet surfaced). Again, I was a student of Jack Kennedy, whose presidency had come to be called ‘The Thousand Days' but was almost as noteworthy for its Thousand Nights – or, for that matter, its Thousand Afternoons,
given the hours wiled away after lunch frolicking in the White House pool, often with his secretaries ‘Fiddle' and ‘Faddle'. Neither was it his New Democrat politics, which, with its blend of public compassion and personal responsibility, was considered a little too conservative by many Cambridge liberals, who lamented Mario Cuomo's withdrawal.

Rather, my problem with Clinton stemmed from his handling of the case of Ricky Ray Rector, a black man whose party in 1981 had been denied entry at a dance hall at Tommy's Old-Fashioned Home-Style Restaurant in Conway, Arkansas. Rector had responded by killing one man and then, three days later, murdering a police officer. Guilty of a double homicide, he could hardly be described as a sympathetic figure. But he was also mentally retarded, chronically so, having destroyed his frontal lobe when he raised the gun to his temple and shot himself through the forehead. Now half-lobotomised and a colossal 298 lb, Rector waited on death row in Cummins Prison, Arkansas, howling, barking like a dog and, according to his guards, laughing uncontrollably.

Adding to his misfortune, his execution coincided with the lead-up to the New Hampshire vote, at the very moment when Gennifer Flowers was hogging the headlines. For Clinton, this presented an opening. Having insisted during a candidates' debate in New Hampshire that Democrats should ‘no longer feel guilty about protecting the innocent', he left the campaign trail to oversee the execution. So, on 24 January 1992, after eating a last supper of fried chicken, steak and gravy, Rector was put to death by lethal injection. Famously, he had asked for his dessert, a plate of pecan pie, to be set aside for later. In the retelling of this story, however, another salient fact is commonly overlooked. Two hours
before his execution, as he watched television news reports on how his final pleas for clemency had been rejected by the Arkansas governor, he announced to his attorney, ‘Gonna vote Clinton.'

For the governor, the politics of the execution were uncomplicated. As for the ethics, they did not appear to trouble him. During the 1988 presidential election, he had watched George Herbert Walker Bush bludgeon Michael Dukakis over the release on weekend furlough from a Massachusetts prison of Willie Horton, a black convicted murderer, who then raped a woman. Early in his career, during the 1980 gubernatorial election, he himself had faced the same accusations of being too liberal, when the voters of Arkansas sacked him as governor – the crucible moment in his political career. Still traumatised by that defeat, Clinton needed to protect himself against the Republican charge that he was the ‘Dukakis of the South'. The execution of Ricky Ray Rector provided the perfect rebuttal.

When the voters of New Hampshire went to the polls in their first-in-the-nation primary on 18 February 1992, Clinton placed second, which was just enough to validate his ringing boast of being ‘The Comeback Kid'. Now, the kingmakers in the Democratic Party marvelled not at his invincibility but at his survivability. With the primary season heading south, Clinton triumphed in nearly all the Super Tuesday contests, which enabled him to lock up the Democratic presidential nomination.

With Fleetwood Mac's ‘Don't Stop (Thinking About Tomorrow)' blaring in the background, he then took aim at George Bush Snr, the hero of the first Gulf War, who was a second-term shoe-in when I arrived in America at the back end of 1991. Over the coming year, however, Bush became the target of a pincer movement involving Clinton and his own guardian angel,
Ross Perot, the fiery Texan independent who arguably contributed more to the president's eventual defeat. Clinton gleaned just 43 per cent of the popular vote, one of the lowest shares for a winning candidate, but Perot's presence in a rare triangular presidential contest meant that it was enough.

As a reward for her efforts in Little Rock, my girlfriend snagged us tickets to the inaugural festivities, that great Arkansan carnival of big hair, Ferrari-red lipstick and ballooning evening gowns, and we jetted off to Washington to witness the commencement of the Clinton era. From his bullet-proof pulpit on the western terrace of the Capitol, Clinton tried once more to evoke Kennedy, with talk of a New Covenant modelled on the New Frontier, but he had no rhetorical answer for Kennedy's ‘Ask what' riff.