Man of the World: The Further Endeavors of Bill Clinton Read Online Free PDF Page A

was working on a speech that would be worth the money.
    Every week or so, Tramontano would come up from Washington for a meeting with Clinton. She would board an Amtrak train for the three-hour trip to New York’s Penn Station, then walk over to Grand Central Terminal and board a Metro-North commuter train for another hour’s to Chappaqua. This time, on the last day of January, she had news that she didn’t want to discuss over the telephone.
    Tramontano called Oscar to make sure that nobody except for Band and Cooper was there. “How is he?” she asked. “Can I come up to see him?”
    She wanted to tell Clinton in person what Walker had told her the day before. Almost all of the corporations, trade groups, and venues that had lined up to book Clinton speeches were withdrawing those commitments—with as many as five or six canceled in a single day.
    “These bookings are just going away,” the gentle agent had told her sadly. “I’m not sure what to do, not sure what the president will want to do.” He paused. “I know this isn’t going to last. They’re going to come back.”
    When Tramontano arrived at the house in Chappaqua, she hung around the kitchen until Clinton came downstairs. They sat down in the living room, making small talk at first. “Mr. President,” she finally said. “I just talked to Don Walker. He had thought most of these speeches would hold, that they would stay with us. But sir, they’re not.”
    The next day, news broke of Clinton’s first scheduled speech at a Morgan Stanley bond sales conference in the posh Florida coastal enclave of Boca Raton, with a reported fee of $100,000, scheduled for February 5. That date had not been canceled, and Clinton looked forward to combining a lucrative speech with a short vacation at the Biltmore in Coral Gables, where he could escape New York’s freezing weather, play golf, and rest.
    The bond traders and the Boca residents were friendly and welcoming. So were the Florida Democrats with whom he mingled at the Biltmore. The speech went well and his hosts thanked him warmly.
    But even before Clinton spoke, the financial firm’s branch switchboards across the country began lighting up with calls from furious clients, threatening to pull their money out. The protests grew so loud and angry that Morgan Stanley president Philip Purcell felt he had to do something to quell the growing panic in his company.
    “I fully understand why you are upset that former President Clinton spoke at one of our conferences,” said Purcell in a message released three days later to all of the firm’s clients and the public. “We clearly made a mistake. . . . We should have thought twice before the speaking invitation was extended. Our failure to do so was particularly unfortunate in light of Mr. Clinton’s actions in leaving the White House.”
    By the end of that week, almost every speech scheduled for Clinton in the United States was gone.

CHAPTER TWO
    With the nationwide explosion of fury over the Marc Rich pardon, Clinton’s adversaries in politics and the media realized how much they still enjoyed lashing him, regardless of his physical exit from the capital. If anything, the compulsion to pursue their old quarry seemed to be swelling, now that he was no longer the leader of the free world but just another defenseless citizen.
    Almost overnight, his poll ratings declined by more than 20 points, with the Gallup poll showing his personal approval dipping below 40 percent—the lowest ebb since he began his national career. Suddenly there was no jeopardy in attacking him, and plenty of opportunities to continue the hunt.
    Both Clinton and his staff had yet to comprehend how persistently the enmity toward him still festered, and how their own seemingly innocuous decisions could flare into nasty complications. Choosing an office space might have seemed uncontroversial, for instance, but quickly became the latest public relations debacle. Like the pardons and the