Story Frame 15 – Bill Clinton's Handshake

From Thomas Jefferson our attention soon turned to a namesake of his, William Jefferson Clinton. In the fall of 1997, Martin tossed a piece of paper on my desk.

“Here,” he said, “I think you’ll like this one.”

I glanced down at the scrap with his scrawled handwriting.

“What’s this about?” I asked.

 “I’d like to interview President Clinton about his friendship with Cardinal Bernardin. Think you can get that for me?” he asked, a challenge in his grin.

Having finished his documentary on Jefferson, Martin was now making a documentary on the late Cardinal Bernardin, his battle with cancer and his response to a false accusation of sexual abuse. Martin wanted me to book an interview with the then US president, Bill Clinton.

I wasn’t part of the production team working on this film and Martin knew it was a longshot that I’d even get the interview. But he also knew how much I loved a challenge. It took a number of phone calls and a formal written request, but against the odds, I got the interview approved and we were given a date in January 1988.

Just days before our interview with the president, the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke. Clinton was accused of having pizza – and more – with an intern. As luck and timing would have it, our interview was scheduled to take place between this breaking news and Clinton’s scheduled State of the Union address. Awkward to say the least.

A few years before, while working on a documentary series about the history of news in America, Martin and I had flown down to the Carter Center in Atlanta to speak with Will Spencer. While there, we had the opportunity to meet and chat with both Jimmy and Roslyn Carter.

Unlike Jimmy Carter, who’d drawn me close to his side in a warm, Southern hug when we posed for photographs together, Bill Clinton took my extended hand and, as he shook it, briefly scanned me up and down. Under any circumstances – but especially these – that felt a bit weird. I’d kept an open mind coming into the interview, but after that visual appraisal, I couldn’t help feeling he was quite likely guilty as charged in the Monica Lewinsky affair.

Rushed into place by the handlers, we settled in quickly for the interview. President Clinton was sharp and informed, quick with his answers. At one point, however, he mispronounced Bernardin’s name. Surprised, I glanced over at Martin’s face. Seeing Martin hesitate, I could guess his thoughts. Which would be worse; correcting the President of the United States or letting it slide and keep the mistaken pronunciation in the film? Martin took the chance at the end of the president’s last statement and told him. To our great relief, Clinton wasn’t at all irritated.

“Let’s do it again!” he said immediately in his Arkansas drawl. “Let’s get it right!”

I did at least admire that about him.

Afterwards, in appreciation for the interview, Martin gave the president an archival newspaper from his own collection which covered Thomas Jefferson’s State of the Union address, thinking he’d like it for the multiple connections. Martin collected archival newspapers and I know it meant a lot for him to part with this. But it was a sincere gesture of his appreciation, and a very cool one.

Historian Elizabeth Marvick, writing in History Today at the end of 1994, noted interesting similarities between the two presidents, William Jefferson Clinton and Thomas Jefferson.

“President Clinton's pre-inaugural celebrations began in 1993, the year in which Thomas Jefferson’s 250th birthday was also widely celebrated. To dramatize the links between himself and the third president of the United States, Clinton journeyed to Washington from Monticello, Jefferson's hilltop house in Virginia (deliberately following) the path to the White House taken in 1801 by the founder of his party at the start of his presidency.

“Before and since this symbolic pilgrimage, Clinton has followed in Jefferson's footsteps in other ways. A striking similarity between the two presidencies is how the media treated them. The press of Jefferson's time, as of Clinton's, was ever ready to publish reports that the president was hypocritical, irreligious, and amoral….”

Bernardin aired on PBS in 1998, but it was not one of Martin’s strongest films and he received some criticism in the press.

“Viewers will appreciate Bernardin’s calm, facing first a false accusation, then cancer,” wrote David Finnigan in Variety Magazine. “But the program often feels less about him than those he left behind, a wake rather than discerning portrait of a complex religious leader. Bernardin was a savvy church politician — smiling in public, (then) cracking knuckles, when necessary, in private.”

Finnegan criticized the filmmakers for being “unnecessarily soft on this gutsy man” and not “painting Joseph Bernardin for what he was — a flawed, human embodiment of living and dying with deep Roman Catholic Christianity. His memory deserves, and can endure, tougher fans.”

The Religion News Service was a bit kinder, crediting Martin and his co-producer, Frank Frost, with having burst through what Bill Baker, president of WNET in New York City at the time, felt was public television’s built-in bias against doing programs about religion.

“WNET has chartered some new religious waters for public television,” Baker said. “(But) there is a fear among some that once you open it up, every one of a thousand religious groups will demand time, (otherwise) you’re perceived as favoring one group.”

“It’s up to us to prove there’s an interest in this kind of story,” Martin was quoted as saying. “That people genuinely care enough to turn on the television and watch it.”

The article further quotes him as saying there is a ‘spiritual hunger’ for such programming and that the favorable broadcast slots given to Bernardin are already “a sign of change.”

Apart from obtaining the White House interview, that was my role in this film – getting it on the air on PBS stations, one by one, city by city, state by state, throughout the entire country. At the time, there were 349 PBS stations in all.

It wasn’t easy, but as I’m not Catholic and had no perceived personal agenda, I could present it as an interesting story and suggest it for Sunday afternoon and evening broadcast slots. Steven Cook’s accusation and later re-canting of it had been national news, and that made my task easier. People wanted to know more about both.

Although Bernardin was not one of Martin’s blockbuster documentaries, and although I was not part of the production crew, this film was a valuable warmup act for me. It provided me with the opportunity to learn (on the job) how to market documentaries, especially on sensitive or difficult subjects, to a disparate group of PBS program executives in a variety of markets, something I would eventually earn a living doing on behalf of lots of filmmakers.

It also gave me positive exposure to Bill Baker, one of the most important and influential people in the world of PBS at that time, and a man who would soon become a personal mentor to me.

Brenda, my liaison at the White House, told me they only accepted one out of every two hundred requests for an interview with the president. In the game of probability and statistics, we’d beaten the odds. To me, it boiled down to understanding the relationship between what you were asking for and who you were asking it of.

Knowing I’d done that and could perhaps do it again in different situations, under different circumstances – well, that experience was priceless.

Coming up next: Story Frame 16 - Chemotherapy, Alligators & Shrinking Kids