What follows is a conversation with Joe Conason about his new book on Bill Clinton, which covers his post-presidency and the election.
Joe, this is definitely an election where you have become maybe the invaluable resource given your "institutional memory" about the media and its relationship with Bill and Hillary Clinton. We talked about a year ago on the release of your book The Hunting of Hillary. What has struck you the most about the coverage?
Armando, thanks. Two aspects of the campaign coverage have been most striking to me: First, the tendency to “investigate” Hillary Clinton and emphasize the most negative stories about her, up to and including the invention of falsehoods about her in otherwise reputable media outlets. The prevalence of fraudulent, exaggerated, and unfair stories about the Clinton Foundation, for instance, has continued for many months—ever since the release of Clinton Cash, the largely debunked right-wing book about the Clinton Foundation by Peter Schweizer, in May 2015.
On the other side, we saw very little effort in mainstream news outlets to investigate Donald Trump, his businesses, and his “foundation” until recent weeks. The result of such skewed coverage is that, absurdly, millions of people believe Trump is more honest and trustworthy than Clinton.
Your new book, Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton, is about his years post-presidency. Tell me about the book.
Man of the World grew out of a profile of Bill Clinton as ex-president that I wrote for Esquire magazine in 2005, when he was about to debut the Clinton Global Initiative. Reporting that story, I traveled to Africa with Clinton and saw what he and his foundation were accomplishing, early on, in providing AIDS treatment to victims in poor countries—who had been abandoned by the West to die by the tens of millions, despite the fact that treatment was broadly available in rich countries. He had taken a stand against this in 2002, but went beyond speech-making to create a solution.
Esquire put that profile on the cover and it was a big success for the magazine. Sometime later, I realized there might be a book in what Clinton was doing—and eventually he and his staff agreed to cooperate, although they would have no control over the book’s content (and didn’t see the text until the book was at the printer). I got to work at the end of 2008, traveled extensively with him abroad and in America, and had more than a dozen on-the-record interviews with him. I also interviewed Hillary, Chelsea, many current and former staffers, and many of the Clintons’ friends.
What I tried to produce from all of that reporting and interviewing is a fast-paced narrative that goes inside and gets close up—so that readers can understand Bill Clinton, what has tried to do, and why. And I hope they will find that story as fascinating as I did.
I've read the first few chapters and was struck by Bill Clinton's decision to focus his efforts overseas. In particular his trips to India were really fascinating. This was his inspiration to create CGI and Clinton Foundation, correct?
You know that Bill Clinton lived under a dark cloud in the days after he left the White House, for reasons that I examine closely in the book—including allegations of White House vandalism that proved to be false and the Marc Rich pardon. But while his popularity fell precipitously to its lowest level ever, he was still widely liked and admired in other countries. His invitations to deliver speeches in Europe and Asia continued to grow, even while they dried up for a while here. And his humanitarian efforts, such as his early work on the Gujarat earthquake in India, were welcomed too.
There is also an issue of post-presidential etiquette—if you’ve left the White House, you aren’t supposed to upstage your successor on the home front. That is why Jimmy Carter focused his post-presidential work, which Clinton admired, on issues such as untreated African diseases and monitoring foreign elections.
It took a while for Clinton to find a purpose for himself and his foundation. But by the time CGI began in September 2005, he had focused on AIDS treatment and a few other projects. CGI grew out of an idea proposed by Doug Band, then Clinton’s top adviser, who had grown frustrated with prevalence of talk over action at conferences like the World Economic Forum. That’s a remarkable story in itself, involving Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google, among many others.
As I understand, your book seems to point to the media's treatment of Bill Clinton in the United States as one major reason why he focused so much on overseas. Am I reading that correctly?
Well, he certainly was happy to leave the American media behind when he went abroad. But the reasons for his decision to address the AIDS pandemic were much deeper than the chronic irritation of negative media coverage.
What about the coverage of the Foundation in this cycle? It's been something to behold, right?
I deal extensively with the coverage of the Clinton Foundation—and for that matter, what the Clinton Foundation actually does and has done. If readers are interested in a sample of the book, we published an excerpt about the campaign coverage of the Foundation on The National Memo website this week. It has been appalling to watch a terribly distorted portrait of the foundation emerge in media coverage—because it is so insulting and unfair to the thousands of good people who have worked and volunteered there. I don’t feel sorry for Bill, Hillary, or Chelsea Clinton when I see those attacks. But I feel sad for the dedicated people who have given years of their lives to its projects.
Last week the attorney general of New York issued a cease and desist letter to the Trump Foundation. Can you imagine if the Clinton Foundation had gotten something like that? We'd never hear the end of it. Thoughts?
You’re right, of course. Even now, the media coverage of this campaign is heavily skewed in Trump’s favor—because the bar is set so low for him and because so many in the political press corps continue a vendetta that began so many years ago, as Gene Lyons and I chronicled in The Hunting of the President and in our free e-book, The Hunting of Hillary.
What should we expect from the media the rest of the way in this election? Certainly media has been doing better in covering the outrages of Trump, but do you think that will continue or will they revert to horserace journalism?
In a presidential election season, media outlets will always cover the political horserace, and that is one appropriate function for them. I expect that we will see more coverage of Trump’s past outrageous behavior, and perhaps more coverage of emails stolen from the private accounts of Clinton aides by Russian hackers. What we won’t see, unfortunately, is sufficient discussion of the real effects of what Clinton and Trump propose to do about taxes, the environment, infrastructure, health care, civil rights, reproductive rights, and the Supreme Court—you know, the actual issues …
Finally, do you think the Clinton Foundation will be able to continue without the Clintons? If so, how do you see that working?
As I explain in the book, the Clintons have been discussing with top staff for months how to handle the foundation should Hillary win the presidency. They have already wound down CGI, which had an enormous impact on global philanthropy over the past 12 years and held its final conference last month. They have announced that they will step down from the board of the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI), which is by far the largest foundation project—and I’m confident that CHAI will continue, providing AIDS treatment to 11.5 million people and other vital efforts against malaria and other diseases that kill the poor across the world. I expect that other aspects of the foundation will continue, although its fundraising capacity will be sharply restricted to avoid conflicts of interest.