On a majestic, sunny morning, I was a spectator to history as President Clinton exited a limo at Vietnam’s presidential palace, which boasts a paint job that would be described by Sherwin-Williams as Nacho Cheese Yellow.
But at least I was inside the palace courtyard.
American might is manifested in many ways, some of it quite visible during the trek that just took Clinton to the oil-rich, incredibly boring sultanate of Brunei and to far more interesting and emotionally complex Vietnam.
There is, for example, the 30-car motorcade, replete with vans of bodyguards, sharpshooters, communications specialists, staffers, a military aide with the nuclear codes, doctors, media and many others. The only longer line is the parade of nations at the Olympic Games.
Well, this mix of supposed security necessity and unabashed arrogance was stymied this day because the palace driveway is large but no larger than those at some homes in Lake Forest or Winnetka.
Therefore nearly half of the motorcade was out of luck by the time Vietnam President Tran Duc Luong greeted Clinton, our most famous draft dodger (by the way, would you believe that on Air Force One en route to Vietnam they played “The Patriot” with Mel Gibson?!).
It was refreshing that, for a change, we had to play by somebody else’s rules.
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“The people are hopeful [but] the government is fearful of globalization and preserving their own system, fearful of China and fearful of democracy,” said a real, live, two-legged individual, acutely assessing what is going on politically in Vietnam.
The same two-legged individual with a first name, a middle name and a last name said lots of interesting things on lots of matters to a small group of journalists in a private room at a fancy Hanoi restaurant.
Unfortunately, he was for popular consumption only a “senior administration official.” Nothing adverse would have come of linking his name to anything he said, some of it very interesting, but it’s the way the Washington game is played, even when many thousands of miles from the capital.
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The most astute line of the week about the ways of Vietnam may have come from a veteran foreign correspondent, opining about the differences between what we once knew as North Vietnam and our wartime allies in the south.
“The people in the north pick your mind. The people in the south pick your pocket,” she said “There’s an integrity with the beauty of the north’s culture, while in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), it’s commercial, full of prostitution and theft, and just totally Americanized.”
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There can be few chores more mind-numbing than being part of the presidential reporting pool. That’s a group of one representative each from TV, radio, newspaper, magazine and wire services, chosen on a rotating alphabetical basis, that trails after the president wherever he goes for a certain period.
Even when the president splits the White House to go 3 miles somewhere, there’s a pool. If he goes out of town, the pool will be with him on Air Force One, while a second, charter plane will take the other reporters if there is sufficient interest.
It can mean exhausting, and professionally humiliating, days or nights. For example, the poor mules who had it one night in Brunei not only had to watch Clinton at a formal dinner, but then had to traipse to a fully lit golf course because he had decided to play nine holes with an official from Singapore a few minutes after midnight!
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They didn’t even see him play because they were stuck in a room at the clubhouse. Afterward, they trailed in a van until he was tucked in for the night at his hotel, not getting to their own beds until 4 a.m.
Then, again, I was the lucky print guy who got to assemble at 6:45 a.m. in Brunei to be shuttled to the hotel where Clinton stayed. We sat in a dinky room for 30 minutes before being beckoned to sit in white vans nearby for yet another half-hour.
Then “POTUS” (president of the United States) got his butt out of bed and the motorcade split for the Royal Brunei Polo Club and the annual Asian-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting. I was alone in a van driven by a welder who asked what his job prospects might be in the U.S.
We sat in another holding room for nearly three hours, doing nothing other than devouring mushroom omelets with the choice of mango, papaya or orange juice, then watching CNN’s coverage of the mess in Florida, including Larry King flattering his aging chums (please, a moratorium on Bob Dole and George Shultz!) and staring out at a stable of polo ponies.
For sure, the president was doing things, but the press was not invited. In fact, the only time one saw him that day was for orchestrated silliness, like walking several hundred yards, from one building to another for lunch (wearing the official APEC leaders shirt, an awful blue thing with a vertical strip down the right side that resembled a tear-away basketball warm-up jacket).
When he rounded a bend, toward the tree I was stuck under, I had a chance to shout a question. Having heard colleagues asking him, ad nauseam, about the American elections, I opted to inquire as to his score for his late-night golf. The question was in jest, but he took it seriously and claimed to have shot an impressive 42 “with two penalties,” pointing two fingers my way for emphasis.
So when journalist friends impress you with mention of how “I traveled with the president to Brunei” or some other exotic place, be informed that it is possible they never actually saw him.
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When you are pool, you have to do a report for all your comrades, so I wrote up a report about the uneventful nonsense of my morning at the club, mostly focusing on what was on CNN. It was nowhere near as pithy as the fellow from The New York Times who covered the initial arrival of the APEC leaders at their opening ceremony.
“George W. would have hated this afternoon. All those names! All those countries. Sure, there were some biggies, but isn’t this Brunei place smaller than the Waco ranch?”
Now that’s writing!
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Clinton’s historic trek to Vietnam was overshadowed by events back home, which was a pity. You can consider him immoral scum but still would have been moved.
In particular, there was his trek to a small village where a joint U.S.-Vietnam excavation for a missing pilot continues. His 25-car-plus motorcade wended its way down a one-lane dirt road, past rice paddies and water buffaloes.
Little kids waved with joy, some surely grandchildren of Vietnamese we bombed during the war.
Clinton’s speech of thanks was short and to the point, thanking the villagers, many ankle-deep in mud at the site, for helping his nation. Then, the two sons of the flier who apparently crashed into this place more than 30 years ago spoke about the last time they saw him, hopping a plane to Vietnam when they were 6 and 8 years old.
Even if you think Clinton was the wrong person to be the first president here, it was very touching.
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When one travels with the president, there are those reminders of being the last superpower, such as the motorcade. But smaller pieces of evidence are revealing too.
Back in Brunei, Clinton had a relatively low-priority speech before a group of Asian businessmen and officials that was part of the APEC meeting. As is generally the case when the president appears anywhere, the Secret Service insists on a security sweep of the room, in this case meaning the delegates had to exit for a brief period.
However, the American media traveling with him were led through a hotel kitchen and into the back of the room to a press area.
“Can the delegates come in?” an APEC official asked a White House functionary. The answer was no; the Americans could stay, but the delegates had to cool their heels outside a bit longer.
“It used to be like this for us,” a British journalist said to me, harking back to the grand days of empire, when they ruled the roost.
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James Warren and Michael Tackett of the Tribune’s Washington bureau are hosts of “Unconventional Wisdom” at 7:05 p.m. Sunday on WGN-AM 720.