<font color=brown> Aaaahhhh, Slick Willie! How we miss him in these days of utter chaos!<font color=black>
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Clinton Busy Writing Own Job Description
By Martha T. Moore, USA TODAY
NEW YORK — Three black SUVs roar up to the corner of 125th Street and Malcolm X Boulevard, in the heart of Harlem. People walking by stop and look. The car doors fly open, and men in suits jump out. Something is happening, but no one is sure what.
Then Bill Clinton pops out of the lead Suburban and walks into Starbucks. And everyone starts shrieking.
"Mr. Clinton's on 125th Street!"
"God bless you, sir. I'm glad to see you here."
"He lost some weight."
"You're the best president I ever had!"
"I voted for you twice!"
Clinton turns back. "I can't believe you're old enough to have voted for me twice," he says to the young woman.
There are other celebrities in New York who ride in black Suburbans with bodyguards. But only one is the 57-year-old former president: elected twice, impeached once, adored and reviled, bouncing between the op-ed page of The New York Times and the gossip page of the New York Post.
For someone who's unemployed, Clinton keeps a busy schedule. Three years into his post-presidency, Clinton is preparing to change his focus. This year, he will tour to promote his memoir and will open his presidential library. After quietly advising several Democratic primary candidates, he'll campaign for his party's presidential nominee. He also wants to build the charitable foundation he created into one that could equal the good works of another former president, Jimmy Carter, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.
Two days before he hit Starbucks last week, Clinton won a Grammy for a recording of Peter and the Wolf with Mikhail Gorbachev and Sophia Loren. The next night, he attended a fundraiser in Washington, D.C., for Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle and a birthday party for Terry McAuliffe, chairman of the Democratic National Committee.
On Tuesday, it's a full day in New York: three speeches, meetings for his foundation and staff, an interview for a documentary, an update on his foundation's programs for The Chronicle of Philanthropy and a reception for Columbia Law School students and alumni.
At each speech, a single can of Diet Coke is close at hand, at Clinton's request. At Starbucks, Clinton gets a large iced tea but skips the brownies and cookies. "That's the one weakness I don't have," a slimmed-down Clinton says. "I never liked chocolate."
While the Clinton legacy draws mixed reactions almost everywhere, especially in an election year, there is no doubt this Democratic city has adopted the former president as its own.
,b>In the half-block walk from the coffee shop to the building housing the Office of William Jefferson Clinton, he is mobbed the whole way. Dollar bills are thrust forward for his signature. Camera cell phones are raised to take his picture. Two cops materialize to back up the three Secret Service agents trying to clear a path.
Clinton visits his office just two or three times a month. He claims that if he is toting a briefcase and looking businesslike, no one bothers him. "They could tell I was lazing around today," he says.
Charting a new course
"There's no real job description for a former president," Clinton jokes in a lunchtime speech to the Council on Foundations, an association for philanthropic groups.
To write his own, Clinton, who has long studied presidential history, looked first to his predecessors who also left office while young.
Memories Fill the Office
"I had no aspiration to go to Congress like John Quincy Adams. I think one of us in the family in Congress is enough. And I'm too much of an activist ever to want to be on the Supreme Court," as William Howard Taft did after his presidency, Clinton says in an interview. "Unlike Theodore Roosevelt, I can't run for office again. Although I'm interested in politics and want to be free to speak about it, I don't want to create a political movement (like Roosevelt's Bull Moose Party). That's Hillary's load to tote now." Former first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton was elected to the Senate from New York in 2000.
Carter, who founded the Carter Center in 1982 to focus on human rights, established a good model, Clinton says. "I sort of decided to adapt it to my interests and my experience and my personality."
The Clinton Foundation focuses on issues the former president says he not only cares about but can do something about: AIDS treatment in poor countries, economic empowerment of the poor, public service and religious tolerance in Ireland and India, among other places. Last fall, Clinton brokered deals to reduce the cost of AIDS drugs and testing in 13 countries in Africa and the Caribbean.
But Clinton spent much of last year in a converted barn behind his house in suburban Chappaqua, N.Y., writing his memoirs - longhand, in spiral notebooks. The chapters on his presidency are more difficult than writing about his earlier years, he says.
"You've got to deal with enough to cover all the main points, but you can't ever turn it into a history of economic policy or foreign policy, or you'll lose the story line." As usual, Clinton found plenty to say. "I've got massive mountains of notebooks."
He received a $12 million advance for his book, which is to be published this summer. About 40% of his appearances are paid speeches, at $150,000 each.
Clinton says he had to deal with his finances before he could devote himself to his foundation. "I had those legal bills to pay off. We didn't have a home. I had to get a home for Hillary in Washington, and then one in New York. I had some considerable financial hills to climb early," he says.
Legal bills from his impeachment defense and other investigations totaled about $11 million when he left office in January 2001. He is also raising money for his presidential library, which will open in November in Little Rock.
Working the crowds
Clinton is known for not being a morning person. But it is commuter traffic, his staff claims, that has made him a half-hour late for a breakfast speech to businesspeople at the New York Public Library. His Secret Service agents can no longer stop traffic to let the presidential motorcade go through. The two black Suburbans have flashing lights and sirens, but they have to wait with everyone else.
His speech is about libraries, including his own. But he roams widely from a history of libraries in the Arab world to a few hard whacks at the Bush administration's tax cuts. He portrays the cuts as taking money directly from poor children to give to the wealthy, including himself. "It's touching to be taken such good care of," he says.
The audience of businesspeople includes a few big names such as Alexandra Lebenthal, CEO of Lebenthal bond brokerage, venture capitalist Alan Patricof and Pete Peterson, Clinton's ambassador to Vietnam. Some share his politics, and some don't. But that doesn't seem to affect their eagerness to get Clinton's autograph.
Clinton greets everyone who wants to say hello. He signs everything held out to him. Businessman Eugene Glaser holds out a photo of Clinton on a Los Angeles golf course in 2001. Glaser and his wife are in the background. Did he vote for Clinton? He won't say. But he offers the picture for an autograph.
Clinton appears to remember the occasion perfectly. "You know who else was playing that day? Pete Sampras," he says, naming the tennis champion.
Before he leaves through the back exit, he shakes hands with the library staff assembled behind the circulation desk.
"This was fabulous. This was fabulous!" says Melissa Grundman, the library's director of corporate relations. Clinton is the first speaker in a series of fundraising breakfasts. "This will make our series," Grundman says.
Clinton's Views
On the Democratic candidates:
"This whole (primary contest) has been handled well. They've shown a lot of class. They've tried to make their case in a comparative way, without being negative, which is what I hoped. It shows you how bad they want to win, which is good. We haven't always been famous for our desire to win."
His advice:
"I told them all when we started, if you want me to talk to you and give you my honest opinion about anything, I will. And I won't hurt you, because I won't take a position until we have a nominee."
Building a foundation
Clinton's foundation has 14 employees with presidential titles such as "domestic policy adviser." Much of the foundation's work is done in partnership with other organizations. For instance, its small-business advisory program in Harlem uses volunteers from the management consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton. (The foundation announced last week that the program will expand to Brooklyn and the Bronx. The overseas AIDS treatment program has relied on 50 volunteers, although some will be hired.)
How the foundation will grow hasn't been decided, says Maggie Williams, a longtime Clinton aide who is now his chief of staff. But it will always rely on the charisma and connections of its founder.
"We're always thinking about 'the Clinton talent,' " Williams says. That's his spontaneity, his ability to think on his feet and solve complex problems, and what she calls "the inspiration factor."
"We draw on it constantly," she says. "He makes (volunteers) understand why this" - she folds a piece of paper, as if illustrating the tedious task of stuffing envelopes - "is important."
So when Clinton speaks at the Council on Foundations conference, he's speaking as a fellow philanthropist, even if he's a recently created one.
The inspiration factor is also in play. Clinton tells the group that tax cuts may have made charitable giving less attractive to the wealthy, but that government program cuts make philanthropy more necessary. "Since we don't need (money from the tax cut) and shouldn'ta got it, we oughta give it all away," he says. "I just want to encourage you."
Some foundation staffs probably skipped the conference because they didn't want to hear Clinton, says Karen Green, managing director of the Council. But there are 1,200 people in the Hilton ballroom, and the council sold an extra 150 tickets.
"Most folks realize he continues to have influence," says Green. "And regardless of their political stripe, they want to hear what he has to say."
Fourteen hours after the day started, Clinton stands in the quadrangle at Columbia University after finishing a speech on the 50th anniversary of Brown vs. Board of Education, the 1954 Supreme Court decision that struck down school segregation.
He repeats advice he gave in his breakfast speech regarding the Arab world, but now for young people of color: "Blaming other people for your problems is self-defeating - even if you're right."
Then he's talking Middle East policy with students who have surrounded him on his way back to the black Suburban. The tone is earnest on both sides.
Still, a young woman plunges away from the crowd, yelling into her cell phone: "Mom, I'm standing 5 feet from Bill Clinton! And I got his autograph!"
February 16, 2004
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