Clinton’s European Ties--Networking Before the Term Was Invented : Politics: The President-elect maintains fast friendships with a wide-ranging group. Many Europeans are included among these ‘FOBs,’ or ‘Friends of Bill.’

They tell a story in Arkansas that the President-elect came out of the womb grinning, shook the doctor’s hand and said, “Hi, I’m Bill Clinton and I’m running for class president of this maternity ward.”

This is almost exactly how the novelist Tommy Caplan, Clinton’s Georgetown roommate, recalls his first meeting with the gangly, sunny-faced young Arkansan. That was another race Clinton won, and as president of the Georgetown student body, he met Rudi Loewe, a Fulbright scholar from Germany, who was attending a 1967 NATO student conference at Georgetown.

“Since you’re a Fulbright, how would you like to meet Sen. Fulbright?” Clinton asked, referring to the senator from his home state.

“I’m just a young German student. I’m nobody,” Loewe recalls saying. “Sen. Fulbright is one of the most powerful men in America, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. He wouldn’t want to meet me.”

“Lunch or breakfast. Yes or no?” Clinton pressed. So Loewe stammered his thanks as Clinton went to a phone, spoke briefly, came back and said “Breakfast tomorrow, in his Senate office.”

Loewe had flown over from Munich to be on Clinton’s plane last week, standing beaming in the Iowa rain as Clinton worked his way down a half-mile long rope line in Davenport. Like all the “Friends of Bill,” or “FOBs,” Loewe has a calming effect on the President-elect.

Just as Caplan was brought in before the debates to chat the candidate back into his natural, easy state, Loewe was with the campaign for gentle therapy on the exhausted, tightly strung Clinton.

Clinton works assiduously at his friendships. When Loewe got back to Germany after his Fulbright time, the letters began, in Clinton’s exquisite script. “Like works of art,” says Loewe.

After the letters came the visits to Loewe’s family in Germany, including one during the now-famous European trip that led to Moscow, and the thank-you letters to Loewe’s mum, and the regular summons to the gatherings of the clan of the FOBs. He was invited to the three-day party that Clinton threw at Oxford, which climaxed in a magnificently illegal all-night barbecue on the roof of venerable University College. It says a lot about the reticence and loyalty of Clinton’s friends that this all-nighter has not made it into print until now.

It was through his friendship with Loewe that Clinton learned his rudimentary command of German, and urged his daughter, Chelsea, to take the language, which she now speaks quite well. For years, Loewe has sent her children’s books in German, and this time he brought short stories, German on one page and English translation on the next.

It was also through Loewe that Clinton has kept in touch with developments in German politics and social policies. Now well-connected in Bavarian broadcasting, Loewe helped set up the Bavarian government’s invitation to Clinton two years ago. When the Arkansas press grumbled that Clinton was spending too much time out of state, Clinton had the perfect riposte. His German trip had resulted in a new Siemens factory coming to the state, with more than 300 high-tech jobs.

The 19th-Century British Tory Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli once complained of his great Liberal rival William Gladstone, “He always has the highest possible reasons for doing himself a good turn.” The role of the FOBs is akin to that.

From boyhood, Clinton has been a most assiduous networker--even before the term was invented. His friendship with Loewe is a classic example of Clinton deploying his charm and high-level contacts to make friends, cultivating the relationship with letters and visits and knowing it will all come in handy one day.

This is not to question the warmth and deep affection of Clinton’s friendships. The devoted loyalty of his friends has been Clinton’s secret weapon in this presidential election year. The FOBs raised the original $1.5 million for the campaign war chest, sustained him and rallied to his side at the worst times.

They have also been, for two decades, Clinton’s little-known asset, a private think tank with an extraordinary range of skills. The FOBs include foreign-policy specialists, economists and trade experts, health-care consultants and legal eagles, experts on European social policies and even Kremlinologists such as Time Magazine’s Strobe Talbot, who translated Nikita S. Khrushchev’s memoirs.

For nearly 20 years, the FOBs have kept up a floating seminar they call “The Conversation.” It is an endless discussion of modern geopolitics, reform policies and the economy, with the unspoken leitmotif of reviving the Democatic Party.

But for the last, intense weeks, winning was the key. And the Oxford connections of the FOB were brought into play again to save Clinton from the defeat that overtook Neil Kinnock and the British Labor Party in April. Bennett Freeman, an American who had studied at Oxford’s Balliol College, was working on Clinton’s debate-preparation staff in Little Rock.

“It was the Balliol connection that did it,” Freeman recalled last week. “I got in touch with two Balliol friends, now working for the new Labor leaders, and got them to fax over everything they could about the attacks on tax-and-spend and character that the Conservatives used against Labor, and did a memo on this for campaign strategist James Carville.

“Hillary was alarmed by the Conservative-Republican connection, and then came the smear about Clinton’s student trip to Moscow. This was almost exactly the same smear that had been used about Kinnocks’s Moscow connections in the British campaign, complete with doctored documents. That really spooked people. The parallels were uncanny.”

So in the debate preparation room, just off the cafeteria in the Clinton campaign HQ, the British Office was opened. Philip Gould, a British advertising man who had been communications and polling director in the Kinnock campaign, flew to Little Rock in early October. He stayed through the election, to explain how the Tories had done it, how Labor had failed to counter and how Clinton could do better.

When Clinton delivered his day-long series of attacks on George Bush the Thursday before the election, it was based on a one-page memo Gould had prepared that summed up the British lesson.

“You must not allow Bush to be perceived as more of a fighter. Clinton is the fighter. Bush is the incumbent,” Gould wrote. “I would put the highest priority in the last few days to jolting voters out of an increasing sense of complacency about a Bush reelection. Voters must not feel comfortable with Bush when they enter the booth.”

The European FOBs took full and happy part in the Clinton celebrations last week. On the night after the election, as the Clinton campaign threw their staff party, only one formal toast was drunk. It was to Gould and the British connection.

Loewe was in Little Rock as well, sharing the triumph with all the other FOBs. So much a part of the Clinton family, Loewe went to a family dinner with an old friend, the Arkansas state trooper who has long been Clinton’s bodyguard. He is learning German, too.