Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton (7 page)

Barak listened carefully to his old army buddy, and promised to consider Azulay’s plea that he carry the pardon request to Clinton. Later, the prime minister made some discreet inquiries among people he trusted in the Israeli intelligence community to check what Azulay had told him. He quickly learned that the story was true: Rich was not a Mossad agent but was instead what the spy agency calls in Hebrew a “sayan”—a helper, or in American parlance, an asset. Without delving too deeply into sensitive details, Barak established to his own satisfaction that Rich and his company had been exceptionally helpful to Israel and the West.

The declassified “telcon” notes released to Burton by Gonzales showed that on the evening of December 11, Barak had reached Clinton in the White House residence, where they had spoken about other matters (“redacted”) before the Israeli brought up the subject of Rich. They were talking often in those days, as the president mulled his final and most ambitious effort to revive the Mideast peace talks that had imploded at Camp David during the summer of 2000. Acknowledging that Rich, this “American Jewish businessman,” had “violated some rules of the game” under U.S. law, Barak nevertheless asked Clinton to “consider his case” because of Rich’s philanthropic activities.

“I know about that case because I know his ex-wife,” replied Clinton. “She wants to help him, too. If your ex-wife wants to help you, that’s good,” he quipped.

On the evening of January 8, the president and prime minister spoke again for about twenty minutes. During the first eighteen minutes or so, they discussed Clinton’s effusive remarks about Barak the night before, in a speech to the Israel Policy Forum, a liberal Jewish organization, held at the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in Manhattan.

Of Barak’s decision to pursue the peace process, with substantial concessions and at no small political sacrifice, Clinton had declared:

No dilemma I have ever faced approximates in difficulty or comes close to the choice that Prime Minister Barak had to make when he took office. . . . He knew nine things could go wrong and only one thing could go right. But he promised himself that he would have to try. And as long as he knew Israel in the end could defend itself and maintain its security, he would keep taking risks. And that’s what he’s done, down to these days. There may be those who disagree with him, but he has demonstrated as much bravery in the office of Prime Minister as he ever did on the field of battle and no one should ever question that.

Indeed, by repeatedly engaging a recalcitrant Yasir Arafat and offering the Palestinian leader a series of fresh concessions on territorial division, the final status of Jerusalem, the “right of return” for Palestinian refugees, and other issues, Barak had consciously placed his own political career upon the altar of peace. Even as he continued to pursue those negotiations—hoping for a breakthrough agreement that to many observers seemed painfully close during those final days—the Israeli prime minister was looking at polls that showed him trailing far behind the Likud Party’s Ariel Sharon in the forthcoming national election, scheduled for April.

From Clinton’s perspective, Barak had done nearly everything he had asked, unselfishly and without complaint. Now he was asking for something that was very much within Clinton’s power to grant, and that conceivably might be justified on the merits as well. It was Barak’s final plea on January 19, when he and Clinton spoke again, that seemed to tip the balance in favor of Rich.

“Might it move forward?” Barak had asked, referring to the pardon.

“I’m working on that but I’m not sure,” Clinton had replied. “I’m glad you asked me about that. When I finish these calls I will go back into the meeting on that, but I’m glad you raised it. Here’s the only problem with Rich; there’s almost no precedent in American history. There’s nothing illegal about [a pardon], but there’s no precedent. He was overseas when he was indicted and never came home. The question is not whether he should get it or not, but whether he should get it without coming back here. That’s the dilemma I’m working through. I’m working on it.”

“OK,” Barak had said.

That final call preceded by only two days the scheduled opening of the last round of serious peace talks in the Sinai Peninsula resort of Taba, Egypt, following many weeks of preparation by Clinton and his diplomatic team. While those negotiations ultimately failed, they came closer to achieving a workable settlement than any before or since. And
for that possibility, even before the talks began, Clinton would always feel deeply indebted to Barak. Clinton’s aides later testified to their surprise when he signed the Rich pardon request on January 20. But given Barak’s pressure and the intertwining of the pardon and the peace talks, perhaps they should not have been.

When the Taba talks faltered weeks later—and after Barak fell, as predicted, in the April 1 election against Sharon—Clinton became even less inclined to “kick him while he’s down.” In the
New York Times
op-ed, he noted the urgings of “many present and former high-ranking Israeli officials of both major political parties” as “importantly” influencing his decision. But he would never specifically mention Rich in the same breath with Barak, a man he genuinely liked and admired.

For his part, Barak and those around him sought to downplay his role in the Rich pardon. Not wishing the prime minister to be blamed for what had become an embarrassment to Israel in the United States, Barak’s staff would tell any reporter who listened that his conversations with Clinton included only one “marginal telephone mention” on behalf of the fugitive oilman. Surely, they whispered, that couldn’t be why the pardon had been granted.

Yet to someone who understood the full diplomatic context—someone like Hillary Clinton, whose first weeks in the Senate were cast into unflattering shadow by the Rich controversy—the only real question that remained was not why President Clinton had signed the pardon in the end, but why he had not clearly and publicly explained his compelling
raison d’état
. In private, sometimes intense conversations with her husband, Hillary came to realize that he would never seek to shift any responsibility onto Barak for what he had, after all, chosen to do himself—and she agreed.

Neither the Burton committee’s continuing endeavors nor the U.S. attorney’s investigation would achieve much of substance—aside from the political damage inflicted on the Clintons—although the lawyers involved kept themselves busy for many months. Upon close examination, there had never been any evidence to sustain the notion of a bribery conspiracy in the Rich matter, and as time wore on both probes began to appear punitive rather than principled. Burton’s partisan pur
poses had always been obvious, along with his loony demeanor. But the media uproar over the pardons had allowed the Indiana Republican to run roughshod over all the cowed Democrats on his committee, at least for the first few months.

The motives of U.S. Attorney White and her senior staff weren’t partisan but professional. Angered as they were by Clinton’s decision and his lack of concern for their opinion, they were also too smart to believe that they would find any criminal conduct.

In Kendall’s view, they behaved fully within the bounds of propriety; unlike the Starr investigation, which had brazenly used Washington journalists as its promotional agents, White’s office did not leak. But her investigators continued to demand the Clinton Foundation lists and then call the donors, long after any purpose had evaporated. She and her staff made Clinton pay heavily for a decision they hated, until her Republican successor, James Comey, cleared him in 2002.

In late August, Clinton received a small measure of vindication on the Rich pardon when reporter Michael Isikoff published the transcripts of the Barak-Clinton conversations in
Newsweek
. Although Burton refused to release the transcripts to Kendall, who had been forced to obtain them from the National Archives and Records Administration, someone had seen fit to give them to a magazine that had often maligned Clinton throughout his presidency. (It was Isikoff, after all, who had broken the story of the Lewinsky affair.)

The
Newsweek
story provided no diplomatic or political context—and wrongly described Rich’s pardon as “unconditional”—but its appearance nevertheless gratified both Clinton and Kendall, who was relieved to see that the documents confirmed his client’s recollection. In a follow-up story, the
New York Times
obtusely observed that the conversations with Barak “do not appear to shed any light on Mr. Clinton’s motivations.”

Most of the ensuing coverage was similarly witless and poorly informed. The mythological narrative depicting the Rich pardon as a corrupt quid pro quo would endure. But the release of the Barak transcripts marked an unofficial conclusion to the pardon scandal. When the Burton committee finally released its two-volume, 1,500-page report on the pardons several months later, rehashing all the same material, most media outlets paid little attention.

Not only had the Rich pardon badly tarnished Clinton’s reputation, but its fallout continued to hinder the most urgent tasks he faced during the first year of his post-presidency. By raising taxes, reducing spending, and most of all by fostering economic growth, he had erased the perennial deficit and come close to eliminating the national debt—but rather ironically, he and Hillary had left the White House carrying enormous personal and institutional indebtedness. Estimates of what they owed to lawyers alone, following the years of investigations and impeachment, ranged from $12 million to $20 million. They also had owed mortgages on two expensive homes, in Chappaqua and Washington, D.C., where Hillary lived in a $3 million house on Whitehaven Street, near Embassy Row.

Meanwhile the Clinton Foundation, established in 1997 to build his presidential library in Little Rock, still needed to raise more than $125 million to complete construction. Despite all the noise over supposedly illicit donations to the library from friends like Denise Rich, the truth was that much of the money raised so far had come in small donations via direct mail solicitations. In 2000, the entire amount raised for the library had amounted to less than $3 million. At that rate, it wouldn’t be paid off until the middle of the century.

Having enjoyed free public accommodation—housing, meals, security, and transportation—for more than two decades, Clinton was haunted by the specter of debt. He had grown up in very straitened circumstances, if not quite poverty; he had never made much money or invested successfully; and he had scoffed when friends insisted that he would almost certainly become a wealthy man after leaving the presidency.

“Financially, you just don’t ever have to worry ever again,” the reliably cheerful Terry McAuliffe had assured him more than once. “Listen, you’re going to . . . at a minimum, sir, you’re going to write a book, you’re going to have speeches. You know, you’re going to get paid a lot of money to give speeches. You’re going to be fine.”

“All right, Mack, if you say so,” Clinton would reply skeptically and somewhat glumly. “I guess so.”

But in the months following his tumultuous departure from the
White House, as the speaking engagements dried up, McAuliffe’s insistent optimism seemed more and more dubious. Even if the speech bookings eventually returned, the library was starting to look like a much more persistent problem. Fundraising from larger donors was rendered nearly impossible after the Burton committee and the United States attorney had demanded the lists of all the library donors and started issuing subpoenas to the individuals whose names appeared on them.

Knowing what might happen if Burton’s staff got the donor records, Kendall had initially resisted the congressional subpoena, citing privacy concerns. But by the end of February, with additional subpoenas arriving from White’s grand jury in New York, he and Clinton had realized that they could no longer withhold the records. Every month or so, the library’s temporary office in Little Rock, then overseen by Skip Rutherford, a longtime friend and campaign aide, would receive a fresh subpoena from New York.

When donors who had given more than $5,000 or so began to receive calls from the U.S. attorney’s FBI investigators, asking questions about exactly why they had given money to the Clinton library, fundraising at that level became nearly impossible. Nobody with enough money to write a big check wanted to attract the scrutiny of law enforcement or the media attention that might follow.

The immediate effect was crippling. As Clinton and his staff knew, the year after a president leaves office usually opens the most lucrative window for library fundraising. Four years earlier, the foundation had started with about a million dollars in seed money left over from the second inauguration. Then in 1998 and 1999, mostly through direct mail and small donations, the foundation staff in Little Rock had raised about $3 million a year, with another $8 million in large and small donations in 2000. Donations were on track to raise roughly $8 million or so in 2001—all of which added up to a significant amount, except when considered against the eventual cost of construction, which would exceed the original estimate of $165 million.

Those numbers represented an emotional burden weighing on both Bill and Hillary Clinton that they rarely expressed. “It was hard,” she would say, years later—not only because the levels of expense and debt were so daunting, but even more because of the sudden, hurtful cool
ness of many old friends and allies who might have been expected to help. As a United States senator, wary of ethical missteps, she could do nothing but watch as her husband struggled.

To Hillary, Bill had always resembled “the small boy digging through the manure because he thinks there must be a pony there.” In her eyes, he was almost too eager to look for the positive side in people, even amid disappointment, to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. Yet during the period since they had left the White House, she noticed a subtle change in him. The loneliness and frustration of the first post-presidential months had not extinguished but certainly had tempered the relentlessly sunny side of his personality, she thought.