Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton (42 page)

It was a hospital that the foundation had renovated, where he listened to “people once skeletal from AIDS tell of their resurrections to robust health.” And as Dugger explained, it was a hospital that had lacked even a single doctor before Clinton persuaded Paul Farmer to come to Rwinkwavu, Rwanda, with the pioneering methods he had used to combat AIDS in the mountains of Haiti.

To balance those uplifting images, her story recounted the Clinton administration’s failure to adequately address the international AIDS crisis and to intervene against the Rwandan genocide. To her it seemed ironic that the Bush administration had provided much more funding for AIDS relief, yet Clinton remained far more popular in Africa. And having asked whether his global AIDS work was “a form of redemption” for him, she noted his “scornful” dismissal of such questions.

“I’m 60 years old now, and I’m not running for anything, so I don’t have to be polite anymore,” he said.

But she also reported the unanimously positive assessments of the Clinton Foundation’s work by international AIDS experts—from Harvard’s Howard Hiatt and Richard Marlink to Bill Gates, who had joined Clinton’s entourage in Africa—several of whom recalled wondering whether the former president was serious about fighting the pandemic, or merely seeking a form of cheap grace. She traced the history of CHAI, the role played by Magaziner and the generic manufacturers, and the foundation’s profound impact on the delivery of treatment in more than two dozen countries, particularly in South Africa, where his pressure on President Thabo Mbeki had proved critical.

Clinton believed he had been “wrong” as president to protect the patents of the American pharmaceutical manufacturers as president, she wrote, but then quoted Dr. Bernard Pécoul of Doctors Without Borders, praising Clinton’s “courageous” advocacy of generic medicines in his post-presidency.

Over the prior two years, Dugger wrote, Clinton and CHAI had been raising the issue of children with AIDS—and were beginning to succeed in drawing resources to those inexplicably neglected millions. According to Peter McDermott, chief of AIDS programs for UNICEF, “Children are alive in numbers we couldn’t have imagined a couple of years ago because of what [Clinton has] done.”

Dugger’s article was more than just another confirmation of Clinton’s status as a leader in the struggle against AIDS. It offered an unusual portrait of him as a joyful, energetic, ambitious, and compassionate figure, freed of guilt and anger but possessed by his work—a man of the world, embraced by throngs of appreciative people who cared only that he had come to help.

And to Clinton’s surprise, not once did Dugger mention his wife the senator, her reelection campaign, or her presidential prospects.

With the autumn of 2006 came a virtual cyclone of events, meetings, controversies, and campaigns for Clinton. On August 19 he had celebrated his sixtieth birthday with Hillary, his brother, Roger, and about a hundred guests on Martha’s Vineyard; the official celebration, scheduled for the end of October would feature a fundraising concert for the foundation at New York City’s Beacon Theatre by the Rolling
Stones, whose lead singer Mick Jagger had become a faithful Clinton friend.

That fall, Clinton was expected at more than 120 events across the country to support Democratic candidates in the midterm election. On a single September Saturday, to mention just one of many frantic tours, he flew from a memorial service for Governor Ann Richards in Texas to a Governor Ted Strickland lunch in Ohio to a Senator Amy Klobuchar dinner in Minnesota, ending with a late-night dessert affair for that state’s Democratic Farmer-Labor Party. Over a single week in October, he appeared at Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee events in Los Angeles, Atlanta, West Palm Beach, Chicago, Columbus, and Louisville, sprinkled between parties for Ohio senator Sherrod Brown, Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick, and Pennsylvania senator Bob Casey. As the current president’s ratings fell, the Democrats were again ascendant, and their crowd-pleasing former president was in heavy demand.

Clinton’s popularity couldn’t deflect a wave of criticism on the fifth anniversary of the September 11 attack, which hit him from an unexpected direction. Familiar themes of blame and distraction, first enunciated with such vitriol in the wake of the 2001 catastrophe, were scheduled for histrionic repetition—this time in the shape of a big-budget “docudrama” titled
The Path to 9/11
, which ABC planned to air as a miniseries over two nights on September 11 and 12. The script had not been shared with Clinton or anyone from his administration, but the advance word was ominous. So was the pedigree of the production team, headed by a pair of avowed conservatives who were promoting the broadcast in advance to right-wing radio hosts and bloggers.

A friend inside ABC Television confirmed the worst that Clinton, Band, and others in their orbit had heard about the project. Although ostensibly based on the
Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States
, the script targeted Clinton, former secretary of state Madeleine Albright, and especially Sandy Berger as culpable for the 9/11 attack, while mostly letting the Bush administration escape responsibility.

As they learned more about the project and Cyrus Nowrasteh, the Hollywood screenwriter at its center, Clinton and his former aides became increasingly concerned. Nowrasteh’s version apparently omitted important facts and literally invented scenes and events that had
never happened. His most egregious fictionalizing depicted a strike on Osama bin Laden’s Afghan redoubt, allegedly aborted at the last second by the feckless Berger.

Like several other scenes in Nowrasteh’s script, in which he readily acknowledged using dramatic license, that incident simply never occurred. The 9/11 Commission’s report certainly provided no evidence to support that exciting imaginary assault on bin Laden’s compound, and further demonstrated that, dramatic or not, the underlying assumptions were completely wrong. Published in July 2004, the report stated explicitly that Clinton and Berger ordered the CIA and the military to use any force necessary to kill bin Laden.

In scenes sure to delight the far right, the script depicted the impeachment crisis as the engine driving Clinton as he confronted terrorism, acting or failing to act as he tried to shield himself politically. Here, too, the 9/11 Report provided no evidence to support that claim—a slur on the reputations of all the military officers who had supported the president’s counterterror strikes during that period.

The script also fabricated scenes favorable to Bush and his aides, in particular Condoleezza Rice, then his national security adviser, who was shown ordering subordinates to implement “real action” against al Qaeda following the infamous August 6 presidential daily briefing. The 9/11 report stated clearly that neither she nor anyone else ever delivered such orders.

On a personal level, Clinton was distressed by the role of an old friend, former New Jersey governor Tom Kean, who had chaired the 9/11 Commission as a Bush appointee—and acted as consultant to the ABC production team with an “executive producer” credit. Was the nice but clueless Kean promoting the Bush White House line on 9/11 because his son, Tom Kean, Jr., was the Republican Senate nominee in his home state?

For several days Clinton, Berger, Band, Cooper, press aide Jay Carson, and Bruce Lindsey, among others, quietly debated how to proceed. Certainly, Clinton would draw much more attention by protesting. A prolonged battle would stimulate public curiosity and could backfire by provoking cries of censorship. They might end up looking more like bullies than victims. But Clinton soon concluded that he had no choice. He had to try to protect Berger, Albright, and himself from a partisan
falsification of history. With only two weeks before the scheduled air date, as the network began to roll out publicity for the movie, the Clinton aides began their own counter-campaign.

Band called Robert Iger, the president and chief executive of Disney, ABC’s parent company, to explain Clinton’s concerns and ask that Iger, a longtime friend and supporter of the former president, look into the 9/11 project to ensure its fairness. Iger responded that the movie still was undergoing final editing and he was unaware of any problems with its content. But he agreed to look into it. Band also contacted former Maine senator George Mitchell, another close Clinton friend who had served as his special envoy for Northern Ireland. The highly respected Mitchell now sat on Disney’s board.

On September 1, with no guarantee that Iger or Mitchell would be able to help, Clinton’s team decided to go public. After consulting with Berger and Clinton defense attorney David Kendall, Band and Lindsey sent a bluntly worded letter to Iger, with copies to Mitchell, ABC News president David Westin, ABC Entertainment president Stephen McPherson, as well as Berger, Albright, and the members of the 9/11 Commission.

Opening with “Dear Bob,” the letter’s first paragraph quoted McPherson, who had said, “When you take on the responsibility of telling the story behind such an important event, it is absolutely critical that you get it right.”

But, the letter continued, “By ABC’s own standard, ABC has gotten it terribly wrong. The content of this drama is factually and incontrovertibly inaccurate and ABC has a duty to fully correct all errors or pull the drama entirely. It is unconscionable to mislead the American public about one of the most horrendous tragedies our country has ever known.” Complaining that the producers had refused to let them see the film, despite several requests, Band and Lindsey alluded to Nowrasteh’s alleged reputation for inaccuracy, and quoted him explaining, with respect to an earlier project on the shooting of Ronald Reagan that had also been criticized for its errors: “I made a conscious effort not to contact any members of the Administration because I didn’t want them to stymie my efforts.”

As a result, they warned, Nowrasteh’s film included at least three significant mistakes: the Berger scene, which was “complete fiction”;
a scene that showed Albright halting a missile strike against al Qaeda until she can inform Pakistan’s military, which also never occurred; and a newsreel clip of Clinton denying his affair with Lewinsky, used to suggest that he had been too preoccupied with impeachment to focus on al Qaeda, an allegation directly refuted by his former counterterrorism adviser Richard Clarke.

With copious citations from 9/11 Commission testimony and its report, the letter dismantled Nowrasteh’s version of events. “While ABC is promoting
The Path to 9/11
as a dramatization of historical fact, in truth it is a fictitious rewriting of history that will be misinterpreted by millions of Americans. Given your stated obligation to ‘get it right,’ we urge you to do so by not airing this drama until the egregious factual errors are corrected, an endeavor we could easily assist you with given the opportunity to view the film.”

Within a few days the letter leaked to the media, prompting a three-sided media battle that embroiled Clinton’s office, Nowrasteh and his supporters in the right-wing media, and the corporate public relations apparatus at ABC, which sought to create an appearance of fairness and balance. But ABC’s position was contradictory: The network chided the Clinton team for attacking a movie they hadn’t seen, while refusing to let them view it before airtime.

Kean came under intense pressure from other members of the 9/11 Commission, who didn’t appreciate the misuse of their work. And actor Harvey Keitel, who played John O’Neill, the heroic FBI counterterror agent killed in the World Trade Center collapse on September 11, openly expressed doubts about the movie’s veracity. “I had questions about certain events and material I was given in
The Path to 9/11
,” said Keitel. “Yes, I had some conflicts there. You can’t put these [events] together, compress them, and then distort the reality.”

In at least one important way, this episode of political warfare differed from previous Clinton skirmishes. Unlike so many times in the past when the Clintons had faced a barrage of criticism alone, a new corps of liberal web bloggers opened a loud, aggressive second front against Fox News, talk radio, and the conservative media.

Ultimately, the Clinton forces won on substantive and symbolic points. Conceding that the invented material about Berger and Albright was indefensible, ABC edited those scenes before the film
aired, cutting the offensive dialogue. (The Lewinsky newsreel footage remained.) The educational publisher Scholastic deleted from its website a series of
Path to 9/11
pages that were to be used by 25,000 high school teachers in conjunction with the movie, a decision explained in a press statement by its chairman: “We determined that the materials did not meet our high standards for dealing with controversial issues.”

ABC broadcast the film over two nights but despite the furor stirred up by Clinton, its Nielsen ratings were disappointing, with only 13 million viewers, or less than half what the network had expected. Disney never issued a DVD of the film, taking a financial loss on the project.

So angry was Nowrasteh over his film’s fate that he spent the next two years making a documentary about its political suppression by Clinton, titled
Blocking The Path To 9/11
and produced with the assistance of Citizens United president David Bossie. The documentary received little attention outside right-wing circles.

Grateful for the support of the bloggers, Clinton invited about a dozen of them to his Harlem office for a celebratory two-hour lunch and discussion. Serving up fried chicken, cornbread, and cherry cake, ordered in from Sylvia’s, the neighborhood’s legendary soul-food restaurant and political haunt, he engaged them in a wide-ranging discussion of current issues—including the role of the Internet in countering disinformation from the right. As
TalkLeft
blogger Jeralyn Merritt later wrote, their meeting with Clinton was “a heady experience” for them. In attendance was Peter Daou, a former blogger who had signed on as Hillary Clinton’s online communications director.