My Remarkable Journey (28 page)

I said, “Fine.”

But Mikhail Gorbachev said,
“Nyet! NYET!”

He said, “I came all the way here for this. I am speaking.”

The other four leaders were looking at each other wondering what to do. It was like watching kids on the corner in high school.

So I went back to President Bush and said, “We’ve got a little problem here…”

Quayle said. “I told you!”

I said, “Gorbachev is adamant.”

Bush said, “Well, he changed the world.”

So I went back to Mulroney and said, “Gorbachev changed the world.”

Mulroney said, “OK.”

Gorbachev got up to speak. I thought he’d go on forever. But he was funny, spoke well, and finished in a few minutes.

When I think back on it, it’s still hard to believe. Little Larry Zeiger from Brooklyn shuttling back and forth like an ambassador
between President Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev…

Look up
charming
in the dictionary and you’ll see Bill Clinton’s picture. Clinton’s biggest enemy wouldn’t last five minutes alone in a room
with him. It would take less than that for Bill to win him over.

I remember when his portrait was unveiled in the White House. There was a reception and George Bush 43 was ecstatic, talking
about what a wonderful person and great president Clinton was. I saw Bush a few weeks later, and I reminded him of the moment.
I asked, “Did you go a little over the top?”

He said, “Are you kidding? Bill’s the best. Who wouldn’t want to spend time with Bill Clinton?”

Clinton is certainly one of the smartest people you’ll ever meet. His knowledge of things is incredible. He met Chaia and
they immediately got into a conversation about American University. She had graduated from American, and he had spoken there
once. He recalled the halls and some of the administration by name. His knowledge is mystifying. He understands so many things,
from cooking to basketball to heads of state.

I love interviewing Clinton. He’s the world’s best interview. Some reporters claim to have been frustrated by him, but not
me. Well, maybe by his lateness—but that’s it.

He has a big heart, a great understanding of black culture, and he’s a problem solver. He was able to defuse the situation
in the Balkans. He left office with a budget surplus. No Monica, and he would have been seen as a wildly successful president.

There was a good line—I forgot who said it. Maybe it was me. “Don’t do anything that you don’t want mentioned in the first
paragraph of your obituary.”

Despite advancements in the war on poverty and in civil rights, the word
Vietnam
appears in the first paragraph of Lyndon Johnson’s obit.
Watergate
is in Nixon’s first paragraph. Clinton is trying to push Lewinsky down to the second paragraph. Still, the first paragraph
will have the word
impeached
.

His obvious weakness is his personal needs. I don’t think Clinton himself could explain them.

But what great man doesn’t have faults? Churchill was manic. Lincoln was depressive. What did Lincoln call it, his blue period?
He’d go into a depression and lock the door. When Lincoln or Churchill would have weak moments, they would remove themselves
for three or four days. They would brood and sleep. Clinton’s weakness did not prevent him from being a good president. He
was and is a hard worker. He was and is relentlessly on top of things.

Even the best presidents are going to have marks against them. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a giant—the best president of
my lifetime. I was twelve years old when he died. I remember walking down the streets and seeing people crying. Roosevelt
beat the Depression and he won a world war. I don’t think any other president has had to simultaneously face two problems
of such magnitude. Yet he didn’t bomb the railways leading to the concentration camps. He never pounded his fist for civil
rights or stood up for blacks in the South. Eleanor told me he could have done a lot more with Southern Democrats, but he
chose not to. I would have liked to have had the chance to ask Franklin Roosevelt about that. But you have to look at each
man on the basis of his background, his time, and the complications he was facing.

As it turned out, the people who tried to impeach Clinton are now footnotes in history. And Clinton turned out to be a hell
of a president.

I really like George W. Bush. George Bush is a great guy to go to a baseball game with. He’s the kind of guy who stays for
the whole nine innings. It saddens me to say that by the time he left office, opinion polls rated him as low as I could ever
remember a president falling. The problem was that he has no curiosity. He doesn’t wonder about things. That’s a major failing.

He did a lot of good things. He’s done more to combat AIDS in the world than any other president. But when I look back over
his presidency, his legacy will be his leadership after 9/11, an unprovoked war in Iraq that was not right at the start and
went terribly wrong, an incompetent response to Hurricane Katrina, and the worst economic meltdown since the Great Depression.
Nobody could see any of this coming when I moderated a debate between the Republican candidates before the South Carolina
primary in 2000. But if you replay that debate now, you can see that trouble was in the air from the start…

T
HAT DEBATE
in South Carolina had the energy of a heavyweight championship fight.

There was no way to know that it would have that sort of electricity when CNN booked the television rights months in advance.
The juice came after McCain won the New Hampshire primary. Bush was the favorite. McCain was the upstart. New Hampshire gave
McCain a tremendous groundswell. The press was predicting that if McCain won in South Carolina, the nomination might be his.
That began an incredible couple of weeks of dirty politics.

There have been nasty campaigns and dramatic ads in the past. One of the most famous was the TV ad that Lyndon Johnson ran
during his campaign against Barry Goldwater in 1964. It showed a little girl out in a field picking flowers with a clock ticking
in the background. Then, BOOM, a nuclear explosion. The message was that if you voted for Goldwater, the world as we knew
it would end. The campaign aired it once, and Johnson cleaned Goldwater’s clock in the election.

But the back and forth between Bush and McCain was largely under the table. There were sordid rumors circulating in South
Carolina that McCain had fathered a black baby. McCain was particularly hurt when Bush appeared before a veterans group and
claimed that McCain had turned his back on soldiers. You can imagine what that would do to anyone who’d spent more than five
years in a POW camp, and McCain fired back with ads questioning Bush’s integrity.

When the two arrived backstage for the debate, there was no warm handshake or hello.

“John.”

“George.”

McCain’s fist was balled.

Bush said, “Hey, man, it’s politics.”

“Anything goes, George?” McCain said. “Anything goes?”

“You’re on,” I said.

There was a third candidate at the table: Alan Keyes sat between them. He pleaded with them to focus on the moral lapses in
society, but Bush and McCain couldn’t wait to go at it. Some candidates get into arguments. But I felt that these guys really
didn’t like each other. I almost didn’t have to ask any questions. At one point, when McCain said that he’d stopped authorizing
any negative ads, Bush pulled one out and waved it in McCain’s face.

It was wild. Whenever I mentioned the debate to either one of them afterward, they would recount vivid memories. I was always
amazed that they could hug each other years later. The one statement that stands out from that debate, that seems even larger
now than it did then, was Bush’s comment that a president “could bring certainty into an uncertain world.”

Little did he know how much uncertainty he was about to face when he became president.

Nothing could be compared to 9/11. I was eight years old when Pearl Harbor was attacked. We didn’t even know where Pearl Harbor
was. But this was New York! And this time we didn’t even know who was responsible. It was one of those moments in life that
everybody remembers. For years, I asked nearly every guest on my show where he or she was when the hijacked planes struck
the World Trade Center.

It was about ten after six in the morning when I heard the news. I stepped on the treadmill, clicked on the television, and
saw the burning tower. I thought it was a commercial for Arnold Schwarzenegger’s new movie. When I realized what had happened,
I jumped off the treadmill and woke up Shawn. Chance was two years old. Cannon was a year old.

Everything became a blur of images. People jumping from the tops of the towers. Finding out that Barbara Olson, the CNN commentator,
was on the plane that crashed into the Pentagon. I knew her husband, Ted. The windows in the apartment building where I had
once lived in Washington were blown out by the speed of that plane as it came down. How did we know if the nightmare was over?
Would the hijackers hit LAX? There were incredible stories—the blind man who walked down seventy-nine flights of steps with
his dog. My producer, Greg, was working so hard he didn’t even have time to absorb what he was watching. We had Mayor Giuliani
on that night. There were no commercials. Who was going to sell foot cream next to 9/11? As soon as the show ended, Greg burst
into tears.

I think we worked for fifty-three consecutive days. I went to New York. The fire commissioner took me around Ground Zero two
weeks after the attack. I remember how they had me put Vicks VapoRub under my nose. The acrid smell was still in the air.
I’ll never forget talking to the firemen. Firemen are exceptional in that they run toward what the rest of us run away from.
One of the firemen said he had a choice to be a fireman or a cop, and he chose to be a fireman because people are always happy
to see a fireman. I had never thought of it that way. But he was right—a cop, you’re not always happy to see. We visited a
firehouse that lost its whole crew.

I remember talking to a derrick operator lifting debris out of the site. He said, “This is not what I’m supposed to do.” He
said he was supposed to build, not take away. Then I went to the same hospital where I’d had bypass surgery and talked with
people who’d been burned. One guy couldn’t be touched because the pain was so intense. They couldn’t even put a sheet on him.
When I look back on the death and damage inflicted by Al Qaeda, I can’t help but wonder about the two Saudi Arabian students
who spent hours in a Boeing flight simulator practicing mid-air turns, but not showing much interest in takeoffs and landings.
Why didn’t we have a clue of what was coming?

Bush looked totally lost when he found out about the attacks while reading to schoolkids. But he seemed to grow before our
eyes after the attack. His response was terrific. He went to New York, put on a hard hat, and picked up a megaphone to talk
to the recovery crews. He rallied the country. Democrats stood and cheered for him when he addressed the nation. His approval
ratings skyrocketed.

He had come in as a guy who was hands-off internationally. Events forced him to be hands-on. He had an opening. America had
the world’s sympathy, and Americans were nervous. Envelopes filled with anthrax powder were being sent through the postal
service. There wasn’t much dissent in Congress when Bush set his sights on Saddam Hussein. Saddam had used poison gas to kill
the Kurds.

I believed Colin Powell when he went before the United Nations to warn the world about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.
Why would he lie? It all looked believable, and who was going to stand up for Saddam Hussein? We invaded Iraq and toppled
Saddam’s statue. Bush showed up dressed like a fighter pilot and stood in front of a banner that read
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
. But the Iraqis never greeted us in the streets the way Dick Cheney said they would. The aftermath was badly planned for.
General Shinseki, who wanted more men, was pushed out. We disbanded the Iraqi Army. The people who didn’t like us just disappeared
and waited to attack when we weren’t looking.

I couldn’t understand John Kerry’s campaign to unseat Bush in 2004. Kerry had won a Silver Star in Vietnam, but the members
of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth questioned his heroism. Kerry should have answered the accusations, even if he simply
acknowledged a difference of opinion. All he had to do to take the matter off the table was say three words to Bush during
a presidential debate: “Where were you?”

That would have been a slam dunk. Bush never served in Vietnam. Dick Cheney never served. Neither did Limbaugh, nor Buchanan.
But they all came off strong and patriotic. I’d seen the same thing that happened to Kerry happen to George McGovern in 1972.
McGovern was a war hero. He’d run thirty-five bombing missions over Germany during World War II. Of all the people in the
Senate, nobody had a better war record than George McGovern. He was a dramatic, tough guy. Yet he was painted as a wimp by
the Republicans, and the public bought it. Not many people know this, but it was McGovern who put through the bill for the
Vietnam Memorial. It bothers me when we don’t see the full picture.

When Kerry didn’t say those three words, it made him seem weak. You can’t say, “No comment.” No comment says, “I’m guilty.”
Kerry lost the state of Ohio and, with it, the general election in 2004.

After the 2004 election I went to see Colin Powell. We’ve been friends for a long time. I spent a couple of hours with him.
It was clear he’d been given bad information about weapons of mass destruction to sell to the world at the United Nations.
His chief aide was furious. “They screwed my man,” he said.

I said to Colin, “Where’s this all going?”

He said, “I don’t know, but I’m out of here.”

A week later, he quit.

There was no one moment that turned the American public against the war in Iraq. But the administration was shaken by the
failure of the government in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. I’d lived through many hurricanes before. I even broadcasted through
one on the radio in Miami. To see people in distress because of mismanagement was much different.