Joseph Anton: A Memoir (62 page)

They had dinner at MIT hosted by a spectacularly cross-eyed provost and then it was time for the Event. He had never received even an honorary degree before, so he was a little overcome by this honorary professorship. MIT did not like handing out honorary doctorates, he was told, and it had only once in its history bestowed an honorary professorship on anyone else. That person was Winston Churchill. “Pretty exalted company for a scribbler, Rushdie,” he told himself. The Event was billed as an evening with Susan Sontag, but when Susan stood up to speak she told the audience that she was only there to introduce another writer whose name could not be announced in advance. She then spoke about him with fondness and described his
work in language that meant more to him than the professorship. Finally he entered the lecture theater through a small door at the rear. He spoke briefly and then read parts of
Midnight’s Children
and the “Columbus and Isabella” story. Then he and Elizabeth were whisked away, and there was a late-night flight to Washington. They arrived in a state of some exhaustion at the Hitchens apartment sometime after midnight. He met Hitch and Carol’s daughter, Laura Antonia, for the first time and was asked to be an “ungodparent.” He agreed at once. With him and Martin Amis as ungodly mentors, he thought, the little girl had no chance. His throat felt sore, and he had a rough tooth that had cut his tongue. The latest on Clinton was no better than a maybe. Hitch confessed to loathing Carmel, who was messing things up by being clumsy, he said. It was time to sleep and fix things in the morning.

The morning brought a fight among the friends. Scott Armstrong came by to say that the White House had decided not to offer Clinton or Gore. He had been told “Nice try, but no.” Carmel had launched a telephone campaign involving Aryeh Neier and others and that had been “counterproductive.” When Carmel and Frances arrived the tension exploded and everyone was yelling at everyone else, accusation and counteraccusation, Frances claiming that Scott was the one who had fouled things up. Finally he had to call a truce. “We have something to achieve here and I need your help.” Scott arranged for the post–White House press conference to be at the National Press Club, so that was one thing done, at least. Then the quarrel flared up again. Who would go with him to the White House? He was allowed to bring only two people with him. Voices were raised once more, tempers ran high.
I called so-and-so. I did such and such
. Andrew quickly withdrew himself from the contest and Christopher said he had no reason to be one of the chosen but the NGOs were locking horns.

Once again, he put an end to the dispute. “Elizabeth is going with me,” he said, “and I’d like Frances to come too.” Sulking, cloudy faces retreated to corners of Christopher’s apartment or beyond it. But the quarrel was over.

The motorcade was waiting to drive them to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Once they were in their appointed car the three of them were laid low by an infection of nervous giggles. They wondered if, in the end, Clinton’s duties with Tom the Turkey would keep him away from their meeting, and if so what the next day’s headlines would say. “Clinton Pardons Turkey,” he improvised. “Rushdie Gets Stuffed.” Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Then they were at the “diplomats’ entrance,” the side door, and were allowed inside. World politics, the great dirty game, inevitably funneled back in the end to this smallish white mansion in which a big pink man in an oval room made yes-no choices in spite of being deafened by the babbling maybes of his aides.

At twelve noon they were taken up a narrow staircase to Anthony Lake’s smallish office, past a flurry of smiling, excited aides. He told the national security adviser it was exciting to be at the White House at last and Lake, twinkling, said, “Well, hang on, because it’s about to get a little more exciting.” POTUS had agreed to meet him! At 12:15
P.M.
they would walk across to the Old Executive Building and find Mr. Clinton there. Frances began to talk quickly and managed to persuade Lake that she should come along as well. So poor Elizabeth was to be left behind. There were many books waiting to be autographed in Lake’s outer office and as he was signing them Warren Christopher arrived. Elizabeth was left to entertain the secretary of state while Lake and he walked toward the president. “This should have happened years ago,” Lake said to him. They discovered Clinton in a hallway under an orange cupola and George Stephanopoulos was there too, grinning broadly, as well as two female aides who also looked delighted. Bill Clinton was even bigger and pinker than he had anticipated and very affable, too, but he got right to the point. “What can I do for you?” the president of the United States wanted to know. The year of political campaigning had prepared him for the question.
When you’re the Supplicant, you must always know what you want from the meeting
, he had learned,
and always ask them for something that is in their power to give
.

“Mr. President,” he said, “when I leave the White House I have to go to the Press Club and there will be a lot of journalists waiting to find out what you had to say. I’d like to be able to tell them that the
United States is joining the campaign against the Iranian
fatwa
and supports progressive voices around the world.” Clinton nodded and grinned. “Yes, you can say that,” he replied, “because it’s true.”
End of meeting
, the Supplicant thought, with a little lilt of triumph in his heart. “We have friends in common,” the president said. “Bill Styron, Norman Mailer. They have been bearding me about you. Norman’s wife, Norris, you know, worked on my first political campaign. I got to know her pretty well.”

The Supplicant thanked the president for the meeting and said it was of immense symbolic importance. “Yes,” Clinton said. “It should send a message around the world. It’s intended to be a demonstration of American support for free speech and of our desire that First Amendment–style rights should grow all around the world.” There was no photograph. That would be too much of a demonstration. But the meeting had happened. That was a fact.

As they walked back to Anthony Lake’s office he noticed that Frances D’Souza was wearing an enormous goofy grin. “Frances,” he asked, “why are you wearing that enormous goofy grin?” Her voice had a distant, pensive quality. “Don’t you think,” she asked languorously, “he held on to my hand just a little too long?”

Warren Christopher was more than a little in love with Elizabeth when they got back. Christopher and Lake at once agreed that the
fatwa
was “right at the top of the American agenda with Iran.” Their desire to isolate Iran more than equaled his own. They too were in favor of a credit freeze and were working to achieve one. The meeting was an hour long and afterward, returning to the Hitchens apartment, all the Supplicants felt giddy with success. Christopher said that Stephanopoulos, who had pushed hard for the Clinton encounter, was also elated. He had called Hitch as soon as it had happened. “The eagle has landed,” he said.

The press conference—seventy journalists on the day before Thanksgiving, better than Scott Armstrong had feared—went well. Hitch’s friend Martin Walker of
The Guardian
said it was “perfectly done.” Then came the quid pro quo, the exclusive interview with David Frost, who could not have been a happier chap and
super
-ed and
thrilling
-ed and
darling
-ed and
wonderful
-ed him for simply
ages
when it
was done, and
absolutely
wanted to have a
drinkie
in London before Christmas.

Jim Tandy, the chief of the security detail, introduced a jarring note. A suspicious “Mideastern man” had been lurking around the building. He had made a call and then left in a car with three other men. Tandy asked: “Do you want to stay, or should we move you someplace else?” He said, “Stay,” but the final decision had to be Christopher and Carol’s. “Stay,” they said.

The British ambassador had a reception for them. They were met at the embassy door by a plummy-voiced Amanda, who told them it was the only Lutyens building in America and then, “Of course, he built so much of New Delhi.… Have you ever been to India?” He let it pass. The Renwicks were gracious hosts. Sir Robin’s French wife, Annie, at once fell in love with Elizabeth, who was making many conquests in D.C. “She is so warm, so direct, so calm; she makes you feel you’ve known her a long time. A very special person.” Sonny Mehta came, and said Gita was okay. Kay Graham came and said almost nothing.

They spent Thanksgiving with the endlessly hospitable Hitchenses. The English journalists and documentary filmmakers Andrew and Leslie Cockburn came with their very smart nine-year-old daughter, Olivia, who said with great fluency exactly why she was a fan of
Haroun and the Sea of Stories
and then went away to grow up into the actress Olivia Wilde. There was a red-haired teenage boy there—much more tongue-tied than Olivia, even though he was several years older—who said he had wanted to be a writer but now he didn’t anymore, “because look what happened to you.”

The Clinton meeting was front-page news everywhere, and the coverage was almost uniformly positive. The British press seemed to be playing down the significance of the Clinton meeting, but the predictable fundamentalist responses to it were given plenty of ink. That, too, was predictable.

After Thanksgiving Clinton seemed to wobble. “I only met him for a couple of minutes,” he said. “Some of my people didn’t want me to. I
hope people won’t misunderstand. No insult was intended. I just wanted to defend free speech. I think I did the right thing.” And so on, pretty gelatinously. It didn’t sound like the Leader of the Free World taking a stand against terrorism.
The New York Times
felt the same way and wrote an editorial titled “Hold the Waffles, Please,” encouraging the president to stick by his good deed without feeling the need to apologize for it; to have the courage of his (or perhaps George Stephanopoulos’s and Anthony Lake’s?) convictions. On
Crossfire
Christopher Hitchens was confronted by a screaming Muslim and Pat Buchanan saying “Rushdie is a pornographer” whose work was “filthy” and attacking the president for meeting such a person. Watching the program was depressing. He called Hitch late at night and was told that the host, Michael Kinsley, felt that the opposition had been “trounced,” that the “foregrounding” of the issue again was a good thing, and that Clinton was “holding the line” even though there was a backstage battle between the Lake-Stephanopoulos grouping and the security-minded aides. Christopher had wise words for him too. “The fact is, you will never get anything for nothing. Every time you score a hit, the old arguments against you will be dragged out and deployed again. But this also means that they will be shot down again, and I detect an increasing unwillingness among the foes to come out and play. Thus you wouldn’t have got a
Times
editorial if there hadn’t been a waffle, and the overall effect of that is to invigorate your defenders. Meanwhile you still have the Clinton statement and the Christopher-Lake meeting, and that can’t be taken away from you. So
cheer up
.”

Christopher had quickly become—with Andrew—the most dedicated friend and ally he had in the United States. A few days later he called to say that John Shattuck at State had suggested forming an informal group of himself, Hitch, Scott Armstrong at the Freedom Forum and maybe Andrew Wylie to “progress” the U.S. response. Hitch had spoken to Stephanopoulos at a reception, where people were listening, and George had said firmly, “The first statement is the one we stand by; I hope you don’t think we tried to take anything back.” A week later he faxed a note—ah, the days of faxes long ago!—about an “amazingly” good meeting with the new counterterrorism
boss, Ambassador Robert Gelbard, who was raising the case at various G7 forums but facing “reluctance” from the Japanese and, guess who, the Brits. Gelbard promised to raise the airline issue with the Federal Aviation Authority, whose new chief of security, Admiral Flynn, was a “pal.” Also, Christopher reported, Clinton had told someone that he’d have liked to spend longer with the author of
The Satanic Verses
, only Rushdie had been in “such a hurry.” That was funny, and showed, Hitch thought, that he was glad the meeting had happened. Tony Lake was telling people that the meeting had been one of the high points of his year. Scott Armstrong was really helping too, Hitch said. Neither of them was impressed by Frances and Carmel, which was worrying; and which, almost at once, precipitated a crisis.

An account of the Washington adventure appeared in
The Guardian
and in the article Scott Armstrong and Christopher Hitchens had both voiced their doubts about Frances and Carmel’s usefulness to the cause. “You have seriously undermined Article 19 in the United States,” Frances said on the phone in tones of extreme, righteous anger. “Armstrong and Hitchens would never have spoken as they did without your tacit approval.” He tried to tell her that he hadn’t even known such a piece was in the works, but she said, “I’m sure you’re behind it all,” and told him that as a result of what he had done the MacArthur Foundation might withdraw essential funding from Article 19. He took a deep breath, wrote a letter to
The Guardian
defending Frances and Carmel, and called Rick MacArthur in confidence. MacArthur said, not unreasonably, that he paid for half Frances’s budget. It was the foundation’s policy to bring organizations to the point at which they could “diversify their funding base” and that meant developing a high profile in the United States. It was Frances’s fault, he said, that she had failed to get attention for Article 19’s leadership role in “the most important human rights case in the world.” He went on talking to Rick until MacArthur agreed not to make the cuts for the moment.

When he put down the phone he was very angry himself. He had just taken Frances with him to the White House, and had praised Article 19’s work at all subsequent press conferences, and felt unjustly accused. Carmel Bedford’s follow-up fax—“Unless we can undo the
damage these self-seekers have brought about is there any point in us continuing?”—made matters worse. He faxed Frances and Carmel a note telling them what he thought of their accusations and why. He said nothing about his confidential call to Rick MacArthur, or its result. After a few days Carmel changed her tone and sent him mollifying faxes but from Frances there was nothing. She sulked like Achilles in her tent. The shock of her accusations did not fade.