Clinton Raises Money While Catching Up With Old Friends

A Park Avenue apartment, a Hollywood bistro or a Georgetown mansion provide the intimate settings. The guest of honor usually arrives late. But his genteel hosts don’t seem to mind--Bill Clinton is in an expansive mood these days.

With his presidency numbered in months, Clinton has taken to exploring the lessons of his life and legacy at cozy fund-raisers in which donors have paid up to $20,000 to hear him. He’s not running, so the money goes to the Democratic Party or to individual candidates.

A hard-nosed observer might call these twilight musings “Soliloquies of a Lame Duck,” but actually “The Tao of Bill” could be a better title. The take-no-prisoners nature of Washington politics, the unexpected role of a president in ministering to victims of tragedy and the formative effect of the tumultuous 1960s on his life and politics--these are the recurring themes of an incumbent at term’s end.

“As we get closer to the end, he feels freer to speak his mind,” said Terry McAuliffe, a top Democratic fund-raiser and Clinton golfing friend. “He doesn’t have to be as controlled in his speeches. He’s done running for office.”

The theme of permanence keeps creeping into Clinton’s musings. Images of rocks, ancient rocks, find their way into his talks. A question about his place in history prompted recollections of sunrise and sunset over the multihued formations of the Grand Canyon.

“People ask me all the time about my legacy,” he said at a New York dinner earlier this year. “It took millions of years to form the Grand Canyon. Doubtless in a few thousand no one will remember that I did a lot to save it or expand it, you know. It’s not about your legacy, it’s about your life.” (In January, Clinton signed an order doubling the federally protected lands of the canyon--a detail some may remember in a thousand years and others not.)

A few weeks ago at an event in Washington, it was a moon rock that came up, one he keeps in the Oval Office on loan from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

“This moon rock is 3.6 billion years old,” he said. “When people come in and they see me and they get all uptight and they’re so angry and agitated and everything, I say: ‘Wait a minute. Time out. Look at that rock. It’s 3.6 billion years old. Chill out. We’re just passing through. . . . We’re just passing through.’ ”

Andy Spahn, a DreamWorks SKG executive who raises money for the Democrats, said that the events are an opportunity for longtime supporters to catch up with Clinton. They want a sense of how he is doing personally. “Many of these relationships are long-distance friendships,” said Spahn. “People want to know, ‘How are you feeling?’ What is the story behind something that’s in the news? These are the exchanges that go on.”

After more than seven years of living in the White House, the center ring of the political circus, Clinton has few kind things to say about Washington. He tells his friends that the contest of ideas has long given way to a battle for political advantage.

He doesn’t dwell on his own role in the corrosive cynicism about government--these are not confessionals about the Monica S. Lewinsky scandal. But sometimes he cannot resist the irony of raking in the cash as he rails against the system. “If we had campaign reform,” he told a well-heeled group in Georgetown, we would “have evenings where we actually debate the issues instead of hustle you for money.”

Still, Clinton portrays himself as a victim of the system.

“When you get in Washington and you get all caught up in this atmosphere, you spend all your time watching talk shows,” he said while campaigning for Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) last month in San Francisco. “To get on [a talk show] all you have to do is take a firm position and never change your mind, and it’s better if you don’t know anything. . . .

“You have no idea how hard it is to concentrate on your job if you live in Washington today. We live in this sort of constant culture of critiquing and carping and who’s up and who’s down.”

Back to bashing Washington the next day in Hollywood, he spoke at a dinner attended by Gregory Peck, Calista Flockhart, Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds and other entertainment figures.

The capital is “turned in on itself,” said Clinton, “dominated by a talk-show mentality instead of a show-up-for-work mentality.” Delivered without a trace of irony, the line got applause.

Hardly a week goes by in which Clinton is not doing fund-raisers. During the last week in March, he had two events in Washington on a Tuesday. On March 30, he conducted three in New York. Last Tuesday he had two more. And Saturday, Clinton flew to Louisiana for a Democratic National Committee fund-raising lunch at a private home in New Orleans. The Democratic National Committee says that Clinton has raised close to $9 million for the party in 23 events through the end of March, an average of $390,000 apiece.

Sometimes, the somber moments of his presidency reappear, as if in a rear-view mirror. “One of the jobs that I was not prepared for as president . . . was the responsibility to comfort the grieving,” he told contributors in Baltimore three weeks ago.

“I never thought when I was running for president I’d be meeting a plane carrying the body of my friend and brother, Ron Brown. [The former Commerce secretary was killed in a plane crash during a 1996 trade mission to the Balkans.] I never thought I’d have to go down to one room after another at a military base and greet 19 families of 19 airmen killed by terrorists [in 1996] because they were serving us in Saudi Arabia. I never thought I’d have to go to . . . Oklahoma City, where nearly 170 people were killed by a man consumed by his hatred for our government.”

Reflections on the 1960s--the decade in which he and his rebellious generation came into political awareness but not maturity--are a staple of Clinton’s talks. He paints it as a time when chaos overwhelmed hope. As he put it at a recent event for a U.S. Senate candidate from Michigan, “all the wheels ran off,” and society careened out of control.

He seems to fret that the upheavals of the ‘60s followed an unprecedented period of economic expansion, a time of confidence like his own closing days in office. “Everybody thought it was going to go on forever,” Clinton said at a McAllen, Texas, fund-raiser in February. “Within four years, we had riots in the streets, President Johnson announced he wouldn’t run for reelection and Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were killed.”

Could America somehow slide into chaos again? Clinton is convinced that if today’s riches are not used to narrow historic gaps between blacks and whites, suburbs and rural backwaters, kids with computers and kids who cannot read, then divisions will fester that may one day rend society.

“We dare not blow this opportunity,” he said. “Some people in life don’t get a second chance, and those of us who do have to be grateful for it. Now our whole country has been given a second chance.”

If the scandals and controversies of his presidency have taken their toll, he does not let on. He has learned what President Reagan often observed, that acting is integral to the job.

Speaking to contributors in Houston, he told of how he had lobbied for Franklin D. Roosevelt to be named as Time magazine’s person of the century.

The anecdote he chose to tell about President Roosevelt had nothing to do with his leadership during the Great Depression or the Second World War. It was about a time when Roosevelt, disabled by polio and using leg braces to walk, fell flat on his face.

“He pushed himself up and threw his head back . . . and smiled and drug himself across the floor to the wall . . . and pulled himself up,” Clinton said. “Life is 50% what happens to you and 50% in how you respond to what happens to you. You can lose a lot of options in life but, as long as you’re breathing and thinking, you’ve still got some left. The thing is to make the most of the moment, with heart.”