My life полностью

“comprehensive” but fruitless search of their immigration and naturalization documents was in response to press inquiries. I know they did some further work on it, because a friend of David Edwards’s told David that British officials had questioned him about what David and I did in those long-ago days. Two Tory campaign strategists came to Washington to advise the Bush campaign on how they might destroy me the way the Conservative Party had undone Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock six months earlier. After the election, the British press fretted that the special relationship between our two countries had been damaged by this unusual British involvement in American politics. I was determined that there would be no damage, but I wanted the Tories to worry about it for a while. The press had a field day with the passport escapade, and Al Gore called it a “McCarthyite abuse of power.” Undeterred, the President kept asking me to explain the trip to Moscow and continued to question my patriotism. In an interview on CNN with Larry King, I said I loved my country and had never considered giving up my American citizenship. I don’t think the public paid much attention to the passport flap one way or the other, and I was kind of amused by the whole thing. Of course it was an abuse of power, but a pathetically small one compared with Iran-Contra. It just showed how desperate the Bush people were to hang on to power, and how little they had to offer for America’s future. If they wanted to spend the last month of the campaign barking up the wrong tree, that was fine with me. In the days leading up to the first debate, I worked hard to be well prepared. I studied the briefing book diligently and participated in several mock-debate sessions. President Bush was played by Washington lawyer Bob Barnett, who had performed the same role four years earlier for Dukakis. Perot’s stand-in was Congressman Mike Synar of Oklahoma, who had Ross’s sayings and accent down pat. Bob and Mike wore me out in tough encounters before each debate. After each of our sessions, I was just glad I didn’t have to debate them; the election might have turned out differently. The first debate was finally held on Sunday, October 11, Hillary’s and my seventeenth wedding anniversary, at Washington University in St. Louis. I went into it encouraged by the endorsements in that morning’s editions of the Washington Post and the Louisville Courier-Journal. The Post editorial said, “This country is drifting and worn down; it badly needs to be reenergized and given new direction. Bill Clinton is the only candidate with a chance of doing that.” That was exactly the argument I wanted to make in the debate. Yet despite my lead in the polls and the Post endorsement, I was on edge, because I knew I had the most to lose. In a new Gallup poll, 44 percent of the respondents said they expected me to win the debate, and 30 percent said they could be swayed by it. President Bush and his advisors had decided the only way to sway that 30 percent was to beat people over the head with my alleged character problems until the message sunk in. Now, in addition to the draft, the Moscow trip, and the citizenship rumor, the President was attacking me for participating in anti-war demonstrations in London “against the United States of America, when our kids are dying halfway around the world.”

Perot got the first question from one of three journalists, who rotated in a process moderated by Jim Lehrer of The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. He was given two minutes to say what separated him from the other two candidates. Ross said he was supported by the people, not parties or special interests. Bush and I got one minute to respond. I said I represented change. The President said he had experience. We then discussed experience. Then President Bush was given his moment: “Are there important issues of character separating you from these two men?” He hit me on the draft. Perot responded that Bush had made his mistakes as a mature man in the White House, not as a young student. I said that Bush’s father, as a U.S. senator from Connecticut, was right to criticize Senator Joe McCarthy for attacking the patriotism of loyal Americans, and the President was wrong to attack my patriotism, and that what America needed was a President who would bring our country together, not divide it. We went on like that for an hour and a half, discussing taxes, defense, the deficit, jobs and the changing economy, foreign policy, crime, Bosnia, the definition of family, the legalization of marijuana, racial divisions, AIDS, Medicare, and health-care reform.

All of us did reasonably well. After the debate the press was hustled by each candidate’s “spinners”