Bill Clinton’s thriller collaboration
Having flogged more than 375 million copies of his novels James Patterson outguns Dan Brown, John Grisham and Stephen King in publishing. His latest project is a political thriller which he co-wrote with former US president Bill Clinton. Here the men talk
BILL Clinton explodes into the living room of his New York home like a heat-seeking charm grenade. There are about six people in there waiting for him, some new, some staff. America’s former president seduces the newbies in turn. It doesn’t take long. He asks one of the women about her kids and how they’re doing at school. She melts. He woos me with long and detailed anecdotes about the various famous-person souvenirs that adorn the room. I’m intrigued.
This is the legend. Slick Willie Clinton. The Comeback Kid. Folksy southern charisma, fierce intellect and an affability apparently undimmed by spending almost 40 years cocooned in a power bubble. When he’s in politician mode he’s almost perfect, even now.
He draws me straight to two threadbare old flags framed on the wall, one American, one British. Apparently they were sewn by jubilant Parisians to wave while the allied forces liberated their city in 1944. Elsewhere he points to framed sketches that musician Bono draws for Hillary on her birthday, and a “fascinating” biography about Arthur Koestler, the Hungarian-British journalist and writer, which he’s reading.
I’m here to talk to Bill about a thriller he’s just co-written with the world’s bestselling author, James Patterson, who joins us from his nearby home, also in suburban New York, looking a bit like the baddie CIA chief played by Brian Cox in the Bourne movies.
As the two 71-year-olds buddy about, they talk putting techniques and Tiger Woods’ comeback. James moans he can’t sleep properly anymore, so he stays up late watching basketball. When they stand up for a picture, James laments the height he’s lost over the years. Bill says he’s just over a centimetre down from his prime of 1,87m, though when I stand next to him he feels closer to my height of (nearly) 1,82m.
Beneath the good-ol’-boy bonhomie, however, something is eating at Bill. What’s that, I ask, pointing to a bronze cast of two hands shaking. It’s Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian president Yasser Arafat, he explains, sealing their famous “brave gamble” on the 1993 Oslo peace accords in the rose garden of the White House back when Bill was president.
The day before our interview scores of Palestinians were shot and killed on the border with Gaza, as Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, a Clinton nemesis, simultaneously celebrated the American embassy’s move from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem with the Trump family. That handshake, a high point of the Clinton presidency, must feel like ancient history?
“Yeah, it does,” he says. “I got physically ill seeing what they did to them [the Palestinians]. Nobody cares about them anymore. Just like I told Arafat would happen if they didn’t take the peace deal. I warned him.” Later, he describes the Palestinians’ decision to reject that peace agreement, at the Camp David summit with former Israel prime minister Ehud Barak in 2000, as “the most colossal political error of my lifetime”.
But what’s really bothering Bill are issues much closer to home. Had his advice to reach out to “left-behind” Rust Belt voters during the 2016 presidential campaign been heeded instead of scorned, he might now be inhabiting the role of first husband, wielding immense power behind the throne of yet another Clinton administration. Instead he’s on the outside, discarded by his party and stigmatised by the progressive movement.
Following the rise of #MeToo he’s become anathema to many on the left. There was a moment in the 1990s, at the height of the scandal that broke over his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, that some liberal feminists rose to Bill’s defence and smeared his accusers, preaching sexual liberation in mitigation for his womanising. But these are different, more censorious times, and Bill no longer has any hard power to protect him.
The Democratic presidential hopeful Kamala Harris said recently that he should’ve resigned over the Lewinsky
This is the legend. When Bill is in politician mode he’s almost perfect
affair. The directive to believe women who allege sexual assault has revived the ghosts of Bill’s past, not least Juanita Broaddrick, the nurse who alleges he raped her in 1978.
Bill vehemently denies this. But reports that candidates are refusing his offers of support in Congressional races demonstrate just how toxic his once potent political brand has become.
WE GATHER around the kitchen table in his Chappaqua compound, about 50km from New York City. James is low key and relaxed in a dad jumper. Bill’s hand shakes as he sips his coffee, revealing a hint of frailty under the blue power suit.
They say they wrote a book together because they have the same lawyer, who thought they might get on. It’s clear, though, that these two septuagenarians also share something else: a pressing concern for the plight of their country. Bill describes the book as a “love letter to America”. James says it seeks to emphasise that being president is a “deadly serious job”.
The book will be Bill’s first novel, but not his first bestseller – his 2004 autobiography, My Life, also sold millions of copies. The President Is Missing will sell by the truckload and the US channel Showtime has already splurged millions on the television rights, which had Hollywood in a state of frenzy last summer. Everyone’s looking for a new House of Cards. This book seems like a savvy commercial move. After all, the Obamas are preparing to coin it, having signed a giant, multi-year deal to make programmes with Netflix. So why shouldn’t Bill also cash in?
So how did it actually work then? Who wrote what? “We alternated the work,” James says. “We just went back and forth with everything, from the title to the outline.” He says the idea of working with Bill was “stunning” to him.
“I grew up here [upstate New York] in a small town and nobody ever came here when I was a kid. But one day President Eisenhower came to town. I never forgot seeing Eisenhower.”
For a thriller writer this project is a gift from the publishing gods. The presidency is the ultimate subject, and Bill the ideal guide. James hopes the book will be among “the best thrillers ever written about a president”. What elevates it, he believes, is authenticity; small details such as the secret tunnels and ten-pin bowling alleys in the basement of the White House, but also the unique insight Bill has into actually being president, knowing that the fate of the world rests on your decisions.
Both authors are keen to emphasise that this is not an overtly political book, but you could’ve fooled me. There’s the title for a start. And the storyline: an apocalyptic computer virus threatens America, so the president, Jonathan Lincoln Duncan, a war hero, goes off-grid in an attempt to stave off catastrophe. The plotting is immaculate – there’s a reason James is publishing’s kingpin. The writing is taut, though cliché-ridden. But the politics are unmistakable. It’s a paean to what you might call the secular religion of Americanism, a post-partisan vision of what the presidency ought to be about: competency, sacrifice, the greater good. It reminds me a little of the way Shakespeare used his plays to deliver dire warnings about Elizabethan England.
Longer term, Bill says, he’s planning a second volume of his autobiography, about his life post-presidency. But conscious of the public mood, he’s for now entering an inhospitable public square with a mask on, shielding his views on America today with the deniability of fiction. The book opens with the president under political siege, facing partisan impeachment hearings compared to the “Salem witch trials”. Sounds familiar.
Bill laments the fact that American politics resembles a “blood sport”, with the voters “like people in the Colosseum”. But does Bill ever feel any sympathy for President Donald Trump? After all, he knows better than anyone what it feels like to be vilified and exposed while in the Oval Office. “Well, I know what it feels like,” he acknowledges. “But since I didn’t go around and attack everybody else first, I didn’t earn it quite so much. A lot of this stuff is just payback.”
One thing he’ll grant Trump is a popular touch.
“Whether you like it or not, one of Trump’s great strengths was that people understood what he had to say. There was almost no government-speak.”
It saddens him, though, that parts of the South, his old stomping grounds, are now referred to as Trump country. “It
may be part of what is now Trumpland, but it’s my culture, I know how people think,” he adds, perhaps still smarting over the way he was ignored by his wife’s campaign when he encouraged them to focus on swing voters in Michigan and Pennsylvania.
Another pressing concern in the book is tribalism. “Our democracy can’t survive its current downward drift into tribalism, extremism, and seething resentment,” says the fictional president at one point. Does Bill think American democracy is truly in mortal danger? “Ask me in three years,” he says. “It’s under assault. It’s clearly one of the objectives of President Putin: if he wreaks havoc, he wins.”
He and James believe that America needs to commit much more of its budget to cyber-security. “We’re spending billions on defence, but we’re spending almost nothing on the scariest threat that we have,” James adds.
BILL never stops performing and persuading, never breaks eye contact. He reminds me that “Roosevelt once said that the president has to be America’s greatest actor”, and you feel like he couldn’t turn the show off now even if he wanted to.
For all his concern over the current state of America, Bill clearly still believes in his old maxim: there’s nothing wrong with America that can’t be fixed by what is right with America. “In this country we somehow find a way to get back in balance,” James says. Bill nods in agreement. “You can’t say America’s in danger yet, we’ve got too much going for us,” he adds.
But the presidential election result definitely sent a strong signal that the mood has shifted. Bill’s Democratic Party currently has almost no legislative power. No control of any big levers of government. What’s gone wrong? “They [Democrats] wake up and they lose 30 governors and 30 legislators in a country where they have the majority in every conceivable poll,” says Bill. “They say, ‘Oh my God, how did this happen?’ It happened because they were both not vigorous enough and not outreaching enough.”
And what of good old-fashioned American sexism, one problem that never seems to go away? What of Hillary’s failure to smash the glass ceiling and the #MeToo movement that followed? In the book, the president’s chief of staff had her own political ambitions thwarted when she was caught calling her opponent a “cocksucker”. If a man had said it, she responds, it wouldn’t have been an issue.
That line sounds like something Bill’s wife might have said. Was it inspired by Hillary’s treatment in 2016? “She never came up with any of this,” Bill retorts, before pivoting hard to talk about the book’s female assassin, who was “raped and abused” in the Balkan wars. “It was awful.” He’ll talk generally about the treatment of women, but is reluctant it seems to go there himself.
One can’t help but admire Bill’s ability to stay bouncy despite his difficulties. As the conversation has been a little bleak, I try a lighter question. “Given your political career is behind you now, can you tell me, Mr President, did you inhale?” Bill grins. “I’m glad you asked me about that. No!”
The reference to the brouhaha that arose when, in 1992, he claimed to have tried marijuana while a student at Oxford, insisting he hadn’t inhaled, seems to perk him up right away. He emphasises breezily that the whole thing was a “phony issue” cooked up by the political media and comes back to it later. “I would have if I could have, but I didn’t,” he adds. “I tried like hell, but I didn’t.”
Towards the end of the book, as the action resolves, the fictional president makes a long, rousing speech to the nation that reads much like an alternative Clinton manifesto. “Think about how different it would be if we reached beyond our base to represent a broader spectrum of opinions and interests,” he exhorts his country. “We’d learn to listen to one another more and defame one another less.”
This, you feel, is the sentiment that lies at the heart of both the book project and Bill’s current frustration. He sees his country divided and the union coming apart at the seams. People are turning to the likes of Donald Trump out of deep dissatisfaction. The nation needs a voice and a vision that can help bridge some of its many chasms. That voice was Bill’s once, the man who, despite all the scandals, ended his second term with an approval rating of 65%, the highest of any president since Harry Truman.
As I pack up to leave the house James is working his way towards his car, but Bill is still holding forth: on the merits of various thrillers, how he really didn’t inhale, and what a wonderful actress Jennifer Lawrence is. The Comeback Kid will keep talking. But is America listening?