Clinton Bill - The truth of power: intellectual affairs in the Clinton White House

Also by Benjamin R. Barber

A Place for Us (1998)

A Passion for Democracy: American Essays (1998)

Jihad vs. McWorld (1995)

An Aristocracy of Everyone (1992)

The Conquest of Politics (1988)

Strong Democracy (1984)

Marriage Voices (A Novel) (1981)

Liberating Feminism (1975)

The Death of Communal Liberty (1974)

Superman and Common Men (1971)

In Collaboration

The Struggle for Democracy

with Patrick Watson (1989)

The Artist and Political Vision

edited with M. McGrath (1982)

Totalitarianism in Perspective

with C. J. Friedrich and M. Curtis (1969)

The
TRUTH
OF POWER

Intellectual Affairs in the Clinton
White House

BENJAMIN R. BARBER

W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

New York London

To the politicians, one and all...

our fellow citizens, no better or worse than us,

who brave the ambivalent will of the electorate,

the frenzied attention of the media,

and the complacent suspicion of the cynics

in order to serve a democracy

to which too many of us remain
spectators and critics.

Contents

r

Acknowledgments

ALTHOUGH THE WRITING of this book was a relatively personal affair in which the primary research was culled from experience and memory, there are a number of people who played a role in its creation. Most importantly, a group of White House staffers who cared deeply about the presidency, the Democratic Party, and the nation and about the role of ideas in shaping them facilitated my modest engagement in the matters described here.

Bill Galston was the intellectual center of much of what transpired under the name of ideas in the Clinton White House; without his spirit of open inquiry and his tolerance for genuine diversity there would have been little to talk about or write about in the domain of ideas. Don Baer was a gracious host to ideas and those who claimed to have them, even where they discomfited conventional wisdom; by insisting that policy and ideology be rooted in serious ideas he gave intellectuals a chance to be heard. Sid Blumenthal, though an adept master of White House spin, never surrendered his openness to contrary ideas and welcomed thoughtful critics to his office and the seminars he arranged throughout his term of service. I take some jibes at him below, which is poor reward for his ongoing hospitality to me and others from the outside.

I also benefited from the openness to my opinions and views of Melanne Verveer, Michael Waldman, Bruce Reed, and especially Ellen Lovell, a White House public servant who exemplified public-spirited dedication to Americas democratic ideals. Vice-President Gore and first lady Hillary Clinton not only participated with extraordinary intelligence and verve in many of the conversations portrayed below but also showed a remarkable tolerance for the long-windedness and self-certainty with which I promoted my own viewpoint in discussions with them.

Darrell Doan acted as a research assistant to the project in its early days and saved me considerable time and effort through his careful research and fact-checkingthough I alone take responsibility for the text that resulted.

In a world of commercial publishing dominated by global corporate conglomerates, I feel very fortunate to have W.W. Norton as my publisher and Alane Mason as my editor. For in a global market society driven by profit and celebrity it is clear that authors need publishers more than publishers need authorsan emerging reality that has corrupted the traditional and healthy codependency of the two. Norton remains a house in which writers and writing are trump, and Alane Mason is an editor who lives that credo by insisting on bringing out the best a writer can offer. If the best isnt good enough, if there are still flaccid passages or sections that read as if they belong in another manuscript, it is not because Alane failed to exercise firm editorial oversight but only because I foolishly resisted her prudent editorial counsel.

Finally there is the president himself. Bill Clinton, as this book makes clear, was and is one of the more problematic if fascinating public figures in American history. But it will hardly escape anyones attention that I have something and somebody to write about only because the president invited me to participate in the intellectual affairs that are my subject here. In the absence of his appetite for ideas, for challenges, for spirited debate and expansive deliberation, without the ongoing hospitality he extended to me and other intellectuals, there would and could be no memoir, no book about power and truth. Much more importantly, there would and could have been no serious intellectual deliberation in his White House. And whatever the ultimate impact of our ideas, it is clear to me that America was much better off for having a president willing to think about and debate ideas and ideals. In this, the debt I owe Bill Clinton is a debt owed him by all Americans who care about the great civic conversation that defines what is best in our democracy.

PREFACE

My Affair with Clinton

THIS IS A MEMOIR, an informal political history, an exercise in personal political theory, fragments of an inadvertent autobiography. An account of my affair with Clinton.

This is not an insider account of the Clinton years. At best I have written the memoir of an outsider, someone who met with Clinton, mostly in the company of others, perhaps a dozen times in the course of his two-term presidency; and who otherwise was in the White House another several dozen times meeting with friends, staffers, and true insiders, people employed full-time by the president. I cannot claim to be privy to inside information or to harbor secrets I will reveal on the pages that follow. Nevertheless, like almost every other human being who has crossed the glowing path of William Jefferson Clinton, I have the feeling Ive had a kind of affair with him. But we are not friends in any significant personal sense, and such kindnesses as he has bestowed on mea birthday card here, a social invitation therewere primarily by-products of my formal relationship as a sometime outside adviser, and can presumably be discounted as normal politics among adept politicians and their donors, supporters, or former counselors. I was in the White House a number of times without ever contributing a nickelother than to pay for my own fare to Washington for the meetings I attended. I was, however, offered the Lincoln Bedroomsort of, during a blizzardbut this did not seem to me to be because the White House was for sale. Indeed, during the years of my extremely intermittent affair with the president, I rather worried that I might appear to be for sale: my views, adjusted to accommodate the biases of those in power, auctioned off cheaply in return for a quite trivial access to that power.

I had a rare privilege for an American citizen: I was invited to participate in some significant discussions about large issues with the president of the United States and, as a consequence, to reflect on the relationship of ideas to power. I participated in a continuing conversation about the nature of American governance and the role of the Democratic Party in its evolving New Democratic form. On occasion, this conversation even felt mildly historic (although that is a judgment only history can make). It is these conversations, and my reflections on themsome very personal, some those of a political philosopherand these alone that I can share. On the basis of fairly careful notes, I have offered specific versions of conversations, some in quotation marks. These are not, however, verbatim quotations, but only reconstructions for which I alone am responsible.