The Bill Clinton I knew

The Bill Clinton I knew

The Middle East, Northern Ireland, Kosovo, campaigning over Aids, easing of world debt - we should remember Bill Clinton for far more than a sex scandal, says Alastair Campbell

Sunday June 27, 2004
The Observer

I do not come to the Bill Clinton story as a neutral, but as someone who likes him, rates him highly as a President and ranks him as the greatest political communicator I ever saw. I come to it also as someone who shares many of his views about the way the right is more prone than the left to abuse power in democracies, and how central the media is to that narrative. And I come to it as someone lucky enough, on occasion, to get his advice, personal and political, and to see him close up on many and varied occasions, whether in the White House, Washington, or McDonald's, Blackpool, or making big decisions, and at times considerable progress, over Kosovo, the Middle East, Ireland, Iraq, Russia, debt, drugs, Aids, the world economy and a lot more.

But, of course, amid much of the current media coverage of his autobiography, whether the generally sniffy reviews or the line of questioning in downmarket TV interviews, the name Monica Lewinsky has featured more than any of the above. Raise this with journalists, and they say it's inevitable - 'it's what people are interested in', as though there is some single strand of public opinion that can only take in one story, one view of a current event at any given time.

In part it is what people are interested in, but only in part. How many millions of words were written about Lewinsky at the time her relationship with Clinton first became known? Is there really that much more to know? Yes, I'm interested, as would be anyone who buys his life story, in how Clinton describes and sees those events now, how he sought to rebuild a life with Hillary, and yes, the image of the President tossing and turning on the sofa because the First Lady kicked him out of the White House marital bed is a fairly compelling one.

I'm interested in his own assessment of his character that made him do something so stupid that might threaten a strong marriage and a successful presidency. But this is not all I'm interested in. Clinton is a big personality who has led a big life, and for some of the media conventional wisdom to boil it down to a view that 'all people are really interested in' are a few moments of madness in the Oval Office gets him, the importance of the presidency, and the significance of his life, all wrong.

One of the more fatuous remarks I've heard in recent days is that My Life, Clinton's autobiography, is too long and, at almost 1,000 pages, short it is not. But this man was for eight years the President of the most powerful country on earth. He has an interesting personal background. He is a man who broke new ground in the world of political campaigning, the effects of which are still strong. He was central to some, if not all, of the events and trends which have shaped modern history.

I, for one, would love to read a book by Clinton on campaigning alone. Or on the US right, or on the Middle East, on Ireland, on the relationship between the presidency and the other parts of the American political system, his assessment of world leaders he knew and of the international order. This book is not too long. Nor, though at times it is too clearly driven by a diary of events that someone has plonked down before him, does it lack pace, candour, and above all a sense of the scale, scope and challenge of the presidency.

I note that he does not record what he was doing when the Starr Report [on the Whitewater scandal] was launched on the internet amid one of the biggest hype operations in history. Given everything else going on at the time, it's probable he has forgotten, but I remember it vividly. He was on the phone to Tony Blair outlining his worries about the state of the former Soviet Union's rotting nuclear arsenal. The ability to focus in detail on something as important, and as remote from the events the world's media and political establishments were about to gorge upon, was impressive, as the Prime Minister said when the phones went down.

Like most people in politics, Clinton went into it because he has strong views and values, and he saw politics as the way to make change for the better. Despite the cynicism of the modern-day media, which as he said last week since Watergate feels it has to portray all politicians as criminals, that is the reality of most politicians. So he is genuinely proud of a job creation record that delivered real progress for families across America. He felt real joy at helping the Good Friday Agreement into being in Northern Ireland, which he describes as one of the happiest days of his presidency. He felt that same joy as he witnessed the return of Kosovan refugees to their homeland, and the subsequent fall of Slobodan Milosevic which, for all the worry and loss of life and the real tension between Clinton and Blair on the issue of ground troops, made it all worth while.

Clinton is a people person. I remember a visit to Northern Ireland, when he was very down because of comments [Democratic Senator] Joe Lieberman had made about the Lewinsky affair, and he delivered a speech in Belfast that was flat and tired, a normally good speaker going through the motions. Then we went to Armagh and an open-air gathering, and the crowd fired him up, led him into a wonderful off-the-cuff speech about how he took the lessons of the province to other conflict zones.

Clinton was, is and always will be a policy wonk. But he is a policy wonk not in the sense that he loves academic argument and debate for the love of debate alone. He is a policy wonk in that he sees politics, and detailed policy programmes, as the route to a better life for people the right tends to forget.

That night in McDonald's in Blackpool, when he had come to support Tony Blair over Iraq, as Tony had supported him so strongly over Lewinsky, was one of the more surreal of my nine years with the Prime Minister. It was, in fact, all in keeping with Clinton's personality and how he saw his politics. He suddenly announced to us that he needed some fresh air and some junk food. And as he, the actor Kevin Spacey, my partner Fiona and I walked along the prom with rain coming off the sea, security service bemused, passers-by thrilled to see him, Clinton loving the lights and the trams, he yelled out into the howling wind: 'How can anyone want to be in those big hotels when they can be out here on a night like this with people like this?' There wasn't a press or TV camera in sight, but by the time the burgers had arrived so had crowds of Blackpool people who came to take a look. As we left he had time for every single one of them.

One view would say this was a serial politician who can't see a crowd without longing for it to love him. But because I had heard so many of the conversations on domestic policy that fired him and his enthusiasm more than anything, I saw someone who was always driven by a desire to make life better for what the media call 'ordinary people' and Clinton calls 'the little guys'.

He was a left-of-centre politician winning and exercising power in a country and a world in which the right holds many of the cards. You do not have to be a natural sympathiser, as I am, to share the sense of outrage at the way the American right abused what power they had to undermine him and his presidency. That ultimately they failed - and he became a two-term President who, with a different constitution, would probably have been capable of winning a third - is a triumph of left over right, and right over wrong.

In his interview for the once great Panorama programme, Clinton was absolutely right to turn on the BBC's David Dimbleby over the media's role in that whole sordid episode as Kenneth Starr [the Whitewater special prosecutor] went way beyond his remit, urged on by a right wing that sees any left-of-centre democratic power as illegitimate, and by a media for whom the only political story that counts is a bad story for the guy in power, and who therefore treats with kid gloves anyone throwing bad news and dirt the politician's way. We'll see if the BBC takes up the idea of asking Starr a few hard questions. I doubt it.

Of course, people are interested in Lewinsky and interviewers are right to ask about her. But people are also interested in their economy, their jobs and living standards, their schools and hospitals, the role that their country is prepared to play in the world.

On all those issues, Clinton has a record easily to match and better that of a President whose recent death saw him elevated to the status of near sainthood by the right and the media, conventional wisdom that grew in the days following Ronald Reagan's demise. Here, we were told, was a man who put a smile back on America's face and tore down the Berlin Wall. Again, this is only half the story, but this time you get the good half. I say that neither to belittle Reagan's achievements nor the genuine grief that people felt, but to point out that when people review the last Democratic President, we tend to get the bad half of the story.

So no such saint-like status awaits Bill Clinton. Nor, given his frailties and failings, will he deserve it. But he and his country's politics deserved better than the appalling Starr, whose report, as Clinton says in his book, mentioned sex more than 500 times, and Whitewater just twice. That statistic probably says more about Starr than his would-be victim. It is a tragedy for Clinton that Lewinsky's name will be part of his political epitaph, and a tragedy entirely of his own making. And you do not have to be long in his company to know this is a man who likes attractive women. Find me a man who doesn't.

I recall a Nato summit in Madrid where the conference hostesses were so beautiful they were driving all of us to distraction, and Clinton was unafraid to admit it. But if there is one thing his book shows, it is not just that there is more to Clinton's life than his sex life. It is that all the other stuff is in the end more important and more enduring.

He is a good man who occasionally made bad mistakes. But along the way he did a hell of a lot of good for America and, with an internationalism and progressive values-based politics not always found in the US, he did a lot of good for the world.

When the Reagan moment comes for Clinton, even with the 10 to 20 per cent that death tends to add to the positive side of the ledger, he will still get very mixed reviews from the press and political establishment. But just as the people came out for Reagan, so they will come out for Clinton, with perhaps less of the establishment pomp and more of the ordinary Joes, the little guys, the blacks, those who felt dispossessed until they had a President who, every day of his presidency, including the ones when he fooled around with Lewinsky, was basically on their side.