Dan's Papers - August 10, 2007 - Bill Clinton On Three Mile Harbor Road

One of the weird things about celebrity parties is that when you talk to people, they do not look at you after a minute or two. After the acknowledgements and greetings and a little small talk, things turn to a general scanning of the room to see who else is there. They are looking over your shoulder.

There are exceptions to this, of course. Two people meet and hit it off. They go off to one side, or into a corner. But soon enough, somebody new comes over and breaks into the conversation with a whole new acknowledgement and greeting and so you are brought back to the reality of the situation, which is to scan over the shoulder. So you assess the situation, consider how you might pick up this interesting conversation later and then, once again, move on.

In any case, I was at a party the other night about five houses down the road from where I live on Three Mile Harbor Road and in this particular case, there was plenty of looking over the shoulder but there was no scanning. There was only the constant, furtive look at the front door at one end of the living room. For there was only one person who everybody was there to see and it was through that door that he would come.

We were all waiting for President Bill Clinton.

When he did arrive, out on the lawn behind that door, we all knew about it because the level of excitement suddenly picked up and a certain charge of electricity went through the room. And then he came in, simply and slowly, accompanied by the owner of the house, Morris Reed.

Mr. Clinton is thinner that the last time I saw him. It makes him look taller, which he is already, at 6' 2". He also has almost silver hair now and because he has let it grow and there is such a great shock of it, it made him look as if he were 6' 4". Or like he needed a haircut. Besides all that, he is tanned and fit, a very handsome man after all.

I have seen him around from time to time. He is a frequent visitor to the Hamptons. One year, he shared umpiring duties behind the mound with me as the guest umpire at the Artist-Writers Softball Game in East Hampton. Since I am the regular umpire, I told him, as I handed him the ball at the start of the third inning, that if he needed any help with anything, any of the calls, for instance, I'd be right over there, umpiring third base.

Most recently, I saw him come trudging up the eighteenth fairway of one of our local golf courses -- I was just outside the pro shop at the time -- and he was overweight and sweating fiercely. Two weeks after that, he had bypass surgery. That was a year ago.

In this living room, when it came my turn to talk to him, I asked him if he remembered umpiring that game all those years ago and he said he did. But it was clear he didn't remember me.

"The Artist-Writers Game is in my book," he said, referring to his biography. Then he looked me up and down and smiled approvingly. "And I like your hat," he said.

I noticed that he shook hands and smiled approvingly and had a nice comment about just about everybody in that room.

When he first came in, he looked a bit weary. He had just come from the home of Irene and Bernard Schwartzman and during the next few days, he would attend, with his wife, several parties at several more homes. The hope was that a weekend visit to the Hamptons would bring in a million dollars to help fund Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign. In the end, it did.

Soon, however, he was out on a deck talking to a group that had swelled to about eighty people and he brightened. He talked about a wide range of things and he talked to everybody there for an hour and ten minutes, by my watch -- an astonishing amount of time, it seemed to me, considering our modest numbers -- but then, he is a talker. Whatever your politics and whatever you might have thought of his two terms as President, there is no denying his intelligence and charm and how he loves to talk.

At the end of his talk, he asked for questions that he might answer and got many of them. I will most remember one man, when asked to state his question, saying simply, "Oh, Mister Clinton, we so miss you. We wish you had never left."

I have been to many fundraisers out here, both Republican and Democratic, and there is always a certain political pattern to how politicians present themselves and Bill Clinton is no exception. Much of his talk centered around his wife's candidacy and in terms of health care, foreign policy, global warming and numerous other things, he would state his wife's position and then say, "Hillary knows more about (topic here) and has a better plan for the future than anyone else and that's a fact."

But there were some very remarkable highlights to his talk.

"First of all," he said, "I want to apologize for my wife not being here with me. She called me. She had gotten on the plane, all dressed up and beautiful and ready to go and then she got a phone call from Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader. There was going to be a vote. An important vote. They needed to call her back to the Senate. And so they told her to please get off the plane and that's what she had to do.

"As you know, in our war on terrorism the President is supposed to get permission from a judge to do surveillance and intervention. It is before a special judge who is available to review on the request in minutes. Well, a higher court has found a flaw in this law and so the Senate had to vote tonight to fix it. Mr. Bush, as you know, has avoided having to get this permission. From the start, he has tried to run away from these situations rather than embrace them. That's why this was important."

He talked about his feelings for his wife.

"You know, when I met her, which was in college in 1971, I thought she was simply the most amazing person I had ever met. We started going together. And then a few years later, I said to her you know you ought to just leave me, and she said why, don't you like me anymore? And I said no, I love you, but if you stay with me, all you will get is Little Rock, because that's where I will be going back to. You should go to New York. You should take one of those jobs that people would offer you. You have a great future. And she said no. She would go where I go. And that's what she did for the next twenty years."

In that regard, he said, "if we were not married and she were running for office and she asked me to do this for her, to campaign for her, I would be here. I believe in her."

He talked about the man who he had hired to work for him, taking care of his house in Chappaqua. But he came around to talking about him sort of sideways. He had been asked what he thought about possibly invading Iran.

"Iran is four times the size of Iraq and has an army four times the size of Iraq's army. And, unlike Iraq, it is a serious army. I want to remind everybody that what we have now to defend our country is an Air Force and a Navy. Our Army is way overstretched holding onto Iraq, which, by the way, had no terrorists before we got there. Let me tell you about the man who runs our house in Chappaqua. He worked in the White House when I was in office there. He was in the Navy. And he was a cook. But we got to know him. When we left the White House, I persuaded him to take early retirement from the Navy and come work for us in Chappaqua, cooking and managing the house. So he retired, but joined the National Guard. So now he'd be off for two weeks in the summer and have to report once a month to a nearby armory and that was fine with us.

"You know what he did this summer? His two weeks consisted of going to Colorado, strapping on a load of weapons and participating in simulated combat operations in the woods there. A cook in the Navy. This is the state of our Army at this time."

He was asked what he thought was the foreign policy of Iran. He thought about it for a moment.

"Iran's foreign policy is very simple. You can have a single digit IQ and understand Iran's foreign policy. It's whatever it is that will annoy the United States."

But then he went on to say that he saw opportunities and mutual interests for America and Iran.

"Right now there are three million refugees from the war in Iraq. There are more coming every day. During the war in Bosnia, there were three million refugees in total. Bosnia is one quarter the size of Iraq. Iran knows if Iraq remains destabilized there will soon be twelve million refugees. So stabilizing Iraq is in their interest. We need to engage Iran about this. It is in both our interests to do so. And from there, who knows?"

"You know, Iran has a wonderful constitution. In the last two elections, the people voted overwhelmingly for liberal candidates. But there is a flaw. The Mullahs and religious leaders have the right to remove people in office and to override laws. This is what we have to deal with.

"One of the worst things that can happen is that they develop nuclear weapons. That will endanger Israel and further destabilize the area. I think we should try to work with the Iranians. We should prepare for the worst and work for the best. That's what you should do with everything in life."

He was asked about what he or Hillary would do in certain specific situations and his reply was a light swipe at Obama.

"I don't think it's a good idea to say in advance what you would do with any particular situation. It limits your options, and gives the others involved too much of a heads up so they can plan against it."

After an hour and fifteen minutes, Chris and I tip-toed out of the party to beat the crowd. Over the PA system, Bill was still talking. He has boundless energy.

As we went out the front door, a young man came up to ask for our claim check so he could get our car. There had been valet parking.

"We have no claim check," I said. "We walked here." He seemed puzzled. "We live five doors down." I took the flashlight out of my pocket. He got it.

We walked out to the street. Cars were everywhere. Drivers seemed puzzled by our flashlight. They put on their high beams. Clinton had talked about global warming. It's an anomaly that somebody would not be in a car on a street. That's what we have come to.

We had been invited to one of the other three fundraisers this weekend. But one, we thought, was enough.

"And it is like I told you," Chris said as we walked along, "if you wait long enough, the President comes to YOU."