Bill Clinton talks to Simon Schama
How do you begin a conversation with the man who knows everything? Steering clear of female literacy rates in Bhutan; the daily amount of clean drinking water available to slum dwellers in Caracas or the rate of coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef, the sort of thing Bill Clinton recites in his sleep or sings in his shower, I try something less expected. “Do you ever think much about John Quincy Adams?”
“Oh sure,” he says, with his most disarming smile. “The first ex-president to do something active afterwards; eight terms in Congress, led the anti-slavery movement.” And then he’s off, as unstoppable in his historical enthusiasms as he is in almost every other subject you can imagine. Sitting next to me at a Dimbleby Lecture dinner some years ago, Clinton used dessert time to offer an exhaustive analysis of the Kashmir conflict, sketched with a marker pen on a paper napkin.
The motormind is still racing. It’s quickly apparent that not only has Clinton given thought to his activist ex-presidential predecessors but that he has established a kind of personal comradeship with them across the generations. Jimmy Carter? “Magnificent … Thirty years since he left the White House; must be 87 now … he just goes chugging along ... Saw him just before he went down to Haiti to build houses.” Some presidents walk alone; Clinton was made to bond, even with the dead. William Howard Taft? “Went to the Supreme Court … suited him better than the presidency I think …” Herbert Hoover? “Left office around the same age as me … ” It’s as though he had got them all together for chinwags over coffee and doughnuts.
Amidst the club of ex-presidents, Clinton likes to confound stereotypes by hunting for good amid Republicans reviled by his own Democratic side. So he singles out Hoover not as the president who claimed that “prosperity is just around the corner” while America was on its knees, but as the young idealist-engineer trying to lift a world from its bloody prostration after the first world war: the reformer later drafted by Harry Truman to reorganise the federal civil service. Even more improbably, Clinton invokes George W. Bush as an environmentalist techno-geek. As governor of Texas (“and not a lot of people know this”) he signed legislation to make it more attractive to put up windmills, “so that Texas is now the number one producer of wind energy in America. On a good day, when the wind is blowing, Texas gets 25 per cent of its baseload of electricity from wind.” This is the sort of thing that makes Clinton’s wonky heart jump with joy....