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

gifts, Clinton’s decision to locate on Manhattan’s swanky West 57th Street fed persistent media narratives about his grasping, high-handed, and presumptuous attitude.
    Toward the end of January, word had leaked to the New York Post and the Daily News that the former president was seeking to lease premium luxury office space in Midtown to house his post-presidential operations. Clinton’s post-presidential office, led by Karen Tramontano, was talking with Rockrose, one of the largest real estate firms in the city, about renting an entire floor near the top of Carnegie Tower, a marble-and-glass palace on West 57th Street, with magnificent views northward of Central Park.
    That same floor had housed Talk magazine—an ill-fated print venture edited by the legendary Tina Brown, British-born queen of media-mad Manhattan, and bankrolled by Miramax Pictures chiefHarvey Weinstein, a longtime Clinton donor and personal friend. Still whirling through the tower’s glass doors and into its supercharged elevators were the likes of entertainment mogul Barry Diller, former Universal Studios president Frank Biondi, directors and producers such as Robert Benton and Stanley Jaffe, America Online chief Bob Pittman, and entertainment lawyer Allen Grubman. Not to mention Jerry Seinfeld, then at the pinnacle of sitcom stardom—“and a huge Clinton fan,” according to his publicist—who was reportedly bidding for offices just one floor below the space coveted by the former president.
    Many of the other potentates of 57th Street were huge fans as well, buzzing over Clinton’s anticipated arrival on their rarefied and luxurious turf. It was easy to imagine him ensconced comfortably among them; his attraction to the world of showbiz had always been mutual. Visiting the building a few weeks earlier, on a visit to Manhattan with Hillary, he had said: “I’m kind of tickled. . . . Here I am in New York, where all the writers, artists, and athletes are above average, and everyone gets their vote counted.”
    Not everybody would be quite so tickled by the pending Midtown lease as Clinton and his prospective neighbors were, however—or at least not for the same reasons.
    The editors of the New York Post , flagship tabloid of Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing media empire, knew exactly what to do when they learned that Clinton was seeking to rent big fancy offices in midtown at taxpayers’ expense. While the United States Treasury is required by law to pay for office space for every living former president in the location of his choosing, leasing the fifty-sixth floor of Carnegie Tower would cost no less than $600,000 a year and possibly much more.
    On the morning of January 28, the Post splashed an embarrassing headline across its front page: “‘CADILLAC’ BILL’S $665G DIGS: OFFICE COSTS MORE THAN OTHER ‘EXES’ COMBINED.” The story inside explained that the rental cost of the Carnegie Tower office space would exceed what the federal government’s real estate arm, the General Services Administration, was paying for the offices of Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and George Herbert Walker Bush, which altogether amounted to less than $625,000 a year. Although sources familiar with the lease negotiations between the federal agency and Rockrose whispered that the price was actually “a steal” at $80 per square foot—when the going rate in that class of Manhattan building ran closer to $100—that argument sank beneath a torrent of outrage.
    At first, the chairman of the House appropriations subcommittee that oversees funding for former presidents—a hard-core ultraconservative Republican representative from Oklahoma named Ernest Istook—responded rather mildly to the Post exposé. “If the [former] president chooses to have his office in his newfound state rather than his home of 50 years, that is his prerogative,” said Istook. “But obviously, it’s going to cost the taxpayers a lot more money.” Taxpayer and public