Bill Clinton says Monica Lewinsky affair was to 'manage anxiety'

Former president spoke about affair with then White House intern in Hulu docuseries Hillary

Bill Clinton claimed in a newly released documentary that the reason for his 1995 extramarital affair with then White House intern Monica Lewinsky was “to manage [his] anxieties”.

“It’s not a defense, it’s an explanation. It was awful. I feel terrible,” he said before trailing off. The former president also likened the stress of the Oval Office to a boxer who had “been in a 15-round prize fight that was extended to 30 rounds”.

“Here’s something that will take your mind off it for a while … Things I did to manage my anxieties for years,” he continues, adding that he is a “totally different person than [he] was” 20 years ago.

Clinton spoke on the affair in the Hulu docuseries Hillary, which chronicles Hillary Clinton’s historic 2016 presidential election run.

Bill Clinton in Paris on 30 September 2019. Photograph: Martin Bureau/AFP via Getty Images

The third episode concentrates on the Clintons’ rebound from the infamous 25-year-old affair that almost stalled both their political careers and nearly ended their marriage.

Bill Clinton called seeing a marriage counselor “one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do”.

In 1999, the former president was impeached by the US House of Representatives for perjury charges stemming from an earlier deposition in which he denied the affair. He was later acquitted in the Senate.

Hillary Clinton, in the episode, disagreed with the affair being the source of her husband’s impeachment.

“He shouldn’t have done what he did, he shouldn’t have tried to hide it, but it was not an impeachable offense,” she said.

Lewinsky, now 46, had come to see her relationship with the former president as “a gross abuse of power”, based on their 27-year age gap and his position. In the episode, Bill Clinton expressed regret over the treatment Lewinsky received in the aftermath.

“I feel terrible about the fact that Monica Lewinsky’s life was defined by it. Unfairly, I think.” he said.

The episode, titled The Hardest Decision, is episode three of a four-part documentary series that premiered Friday.

(Source: The Guardian)

Bill Clinton impeachment 20 years on: The parallels with Trump, and the differences

Clinton was only second US president to be impeached

It has been 20 years since Bill Clinton was impeached by the House of Representatives, on grounds of perjury and obstruction of justice, becoming only the second president in US history – the first being Andrew Johnson in 1868 – to undergo such censure.

Other than a handful of names, those of former intern Monica Lewinsky and independent counsel Kenneth Starr, along with a few of the more sordid details, it can be hard to remember many of the specifics.

But at the time it was a relentless, frenzied matter, as complex and arcane in its outer reaches as it was both basic and simple at its core: the president lied under oath about having an illicit affair with a government employee and was punished for having done so.

He could have lost his job, but full impeachment requires confirmation by two-thirds of the upper chamber of congress, and not a single Democratic senator voted to censure the president.

Two decades on, with many in the country urging Democrats to launch impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump, it is instructive to consider the similarities and differences between their circumstances. It may also be worth reflecting on the fallout from Clinton’s impeachment, not just for him and his family, but for those Republicans who led it and then suffered a backlash from voters at the midterm elections.

What were origins of Clinton’s impeachment?
It would take a book, and many have been written, to detail the Byzantine twists and 90-degree turns that resulted in the 42nd president’s impeachment.

Its origins began in the investigation of an alleged real estate scam said to have involved Bill and Hillary Clinton and their associates, Jim and Susan McDougal, during the 1970s and 1980s. While no evidence of wrongdoing was ever found against the Clintons, the attorney general Janet Reno, appointed a special counsel, Kenneth Starr, to look into the matter. Starr’s three-year probe eventually came to look at a host of matters linked to the Clintons – including the firing of White House travel agents and the suicide of deputy White House counsel Vince Foster.

With the permission of Reno, Starr also decided to press ahead and speak to people involved in another case targeting Clinton, the sexual harassment lawsuit filed by Paula Jones, a former Arkansas state employee who accused the president of harassment while he was the state governor. Clinton denied the allegations.

Paula Jones
As part of an attempt to show Clinton’s alleged harassment of her was part of a broader pattern, Jones learned through Linda Tripp, a one-time friend of Lewinsky who believed Clinton had abused the office of the president, that Clinton had secretly enjoyed a sexual relationship with the one-time intern. Pretending to be her friend, Tripp had taped Lewinsky, tried to get her to incriminate Clinton and advised her not to send to the cleaners a blue dress that contained the president’s DNA.

On 17 January 1998, Clinton gave a sworn deposition in which he denied having a sexual relationship or affair with Lewinsky. White House spokesman Mike McCurry told reporters that Clinton viewed the matter as “a distraction but… not a burdensome distraction”. Ten days later, the president told reporters, in words that would come back to haunt him: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.”

That summer, confronted by Starr at an in camera grand jury hearing with the recordings made of Lewinsky by Tripp, Clinton admitted he had engaged in a relationship with Lewinsky.

“I know that my public comments and my silence about this matter gave a false impression. I misled people, including even my wife. I deeply regret that.”

Weeks later, Starr released his eponymous report. “The nature of the relationship was the subject of many of the president’s false statements, and his desire to keep the relationship secret provides a motive for many of his actions that apparently were designed to obstruct justice,” he wrote.

Pat Roberton, head of the powerful Christian Coalition that held its annual convention days after the report was released, brought the hall to its feet with a call to impeach Clinton: “As landlords of the White House, it’s time to tell this occupant his lease has expired.”

How the two chambers voted
On 19 December 1998, after a delay caused by the US’s bombing of Iraq, which Clinton’s critics said was an attempted distraction from domestic affairs, much like the 20 August missile strikes on alleged Al-Qaeda targets in Sudan and Afghanistan, the House voted to impeach Clinton on two of four charges.

It voted 228-206 on the count of perjury, and 221-212 on a count of obstruction of justice. A second perjury count and one of abuse of power failed.

On 9 February 1999, the Senate, after a month-long debate, voted on the two charges. Fifty senators voted to remove Clinton on the obstruction of justice charge, and 45 voted to remove him on the perjury charge. Not a single Democratic senator voted to convict on either charge.

Because a two-thirds majority was required to convict him, Clinton was acquitted.

The backlash
The context in which Clinton’s impeachment occurred was that of a strong, powerful Republican Party that since 1994, in what became known as the revolution of speaker Newt Gingrich, had controlled both houses.

As it was, as the impeachment process went on, the US public became convinced the Republicans were overreaching. Gingrich believed the party would pick up seats in the 1998 midterms; they lost four, while narrowly holding the House, and Gingrich resigned as speaker, as he had said he would. Not since 1822 had the party controlling the White House gained ground in the sixth year of a presidency. Republicans were stunned, though not enough to call off their impeachment plan.

The planned impeachment also failed to have an impact on Senate races, with the upper chamber staying 55-45 in favour of the Republicans.

Only a handful of the Republican “managers” of the impeachment remain in politics – Gingrich, Bob Livingston and Tom DeLay all resigned. In 2015, Dennis Hastert, who succeeded Gingrich as speaker, entered a plea deal with prosecutors over financial misconduct carried out to pay hush money to cover up his sexual abuse of students while a teacher and coach at Yorkville High School, Illinois.

Similarities to Trump
Like Clinton, Trump faces a fired-up, newly emboldened political opposition in the Democrats, who will in January take control of the House. Many of the new members, which include a record number of women and progressives, appear keen to punish Trump.

Many believe his behaviour in office, be it his firing of James Comey, his defending of his son’s June 2016 meeting with a Kremlin-linked lawyer in Trump Tower, amount to either “treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanours”, the standard for impeachment as laid out by the constitution.

The differences
To date, Trump has been found guilty of no crime, and many independent observers say despite guilty pleas made by some of his associates, it would be hard at this moment to point to hard evidence of collusion. (Collusion does not have a legal definition.) They also point out that while Michael Cohen told prosecutors he had paid hush money to Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal at Trump’s behest, the president has not yet been indicted, and may never be while he remains in office.

And Democrats, skilfully if cautiously led by Nancy Pelosi, want to avoid the sort of backlash suffered by the Republicans in 1998, as they look ahead to the 2020 president election. During the 2018 midterms, Pelosi’s office told Democratic candidates to avoid the impeachment word at all costs, saying it could prove divisive and rally Trump’s base. Instead, they regained control of the House by talking about issues such as healthcare and the economy.

The fallout
Attitudes towards the two-year relationship between Lewinsky and Clinton have changed in last two decades, especially following the emergence of the #MeToo movement in which women, and men, spoke of their experiences of being allegedly sexually assaulted and harassed at the hands of powerful people such as Harvey Weinstein. The producer, currently charged with assaulting two women, has denied the allegations.

Could an affair between a sitting president and a 22-year-old intern, some have asked, ever be truly consensual? Shortly after Clinton was impeached, Lewinsky cooperated with author Andrew Morton for an authorised biography, Monica’s Story. As part of the publicity tour she came to London, where in an interview with The Independent, she said she had learned two lessons: one, that she was wrong to trust her friend Tripp, and the second was “not to have an affair with a married man”.

In a recent Slow Burn podcast produced by Slate, Tripp claimed she had no idea at the time how her decision to inform the special prosecutor would play out. 

“Sitting here today, I have no clue what I thought was going to happen. It was sort of fuzzy. But there wasn’t an organised master plan of what I was thinking,” she said. “This was flying by the seat of my pants, terrified, out of my wits, completely guilt-ridden that I was having to manipulate her, but convinced in my soul that in the end it would benefit her.”

During the 2016 election campaign, Trump, who had been accused of sexual harassment by a number of women, sought to seize on the decades-worth of allegations about Bill Clinton by inviting several of his accusers – among them Kathleen Willey, Juanita Broaddrick and Paula Jones – to attend one of the presidential debates with Hillary Clinton.

(Source: The Independent)

Hillary says Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky was not an abuse of power

When asked if her husband should have resigned over the scandal, the 2016 Democratic nominee for president said, “Absolutely not.”

Hillary Clinton said Sunday that her husband, former President Bill Clinton, was right not to resign over his affair with then-White House intern Monica Lewinsky and the subsequent scandal that rocked his administration in the late 1990s.

“Absolutely not,” Hillary Clinton, a champion of the Me Too movement, told CBS’ “Sunday Morning” when asked whether Bill Clinton should have stepped down.

The former secretary of state and 2016 Democratic nominee for president denied that her husband’s sexual relationship with Lewinksy, who was 22 when it began, should be considered an abuse of power.

When CBS’ Tony Dokoupil noted that critics say it’s impossible for a president to have a consensual relationship with an intern, Hillary Clinton responded that Lewinsky was “an adult,” then steered the conversation toward the numerous sexual misconduct allegations against President Donald Trump.

“Let me ask you this, where’s the investigation of the current incumbent against whom numerous allegations have been made and which he dismisses, denies and ridicules?” Clinton asked. “So there was an investigation and it, as I believe, came out in the right place.”

Clinton stood by her husband after he was impeached in late 1998 for lying about his affair with Lewinsky. After a monthlong trial, the Senate in February 1999 ultimately fell well short of the two-thirds majority needed to convict and remove him from office.

Lewinsky has said in the past that her affair with Bill Clinton was consensual, but has reconsidered that view recently. Several other women have accused him of sexual misconduct going as far back as the 1970s, which he has vehemently denied.

Similar to Trump’s tactics, Bill Clinton has had a history of dismissing the allegations as lies. Hillary Clinton told CBS that she played no role in criticizing the character of her husband’s accusers.

“I take responsibility for my life and my actions,” she said.

(Source: HuffPo)

Bill Clinton addresses his remarks on Lewinsky scandal, says he supports #MeToo

Former President Bill Clinton used the opening of a book tour event in New York on Monday to respond to a defensive interview he gave NBC News in which he defended his handling of the Monica Lewinsky scandal and said that he didn't have to apologize to her.

Asked by author Walter Mosley about the response, Clinton said, "The truth is, the hubbub was I got hot under the collar because of the way the questions were asked. And I think what was lost were the two points that I made that are important to me."

"The suggestion was that I never apologized for what caused all the trouble for me 20 years ago," Clinton said. "First point is, I did. I meant it then, I meant it now. I apologized to my family, to Monica Lewinsky and her family and to the American people before a panel of ministers in the White House, which was widely reported. So I did that. I meant it then and I mean it today. I live with it all the time."

Clinton added: "The second is that I support the Me Too movement and. Think it is long overdue, and I have always tried to support it in the decisions and policies that I advanced. Beyond that, I think it would be good if we could go on with the discussion."

The former president had defended himself from recent criticism of his affair with Lewinsky in light of the #MeToo movement, telling NBC News in an interview that aired Monday that he never reached out to the former White House intern following the scandal.

Speaking to "Today," Clinton defended his decision to remain in office following the scandal.

"A lot of the facts have been conveniently omitted to make the story work, I think partly because they're frustrated that they got all these serious allegations against the current occupant of the Oval Office and his voters don't seem to care," Clinton said, pointing to a series of sexual misconduct allegations against current President Donald Trump, who has denied them. "I think I did the right thing. I defended the Constitution."

Asked if he owed Lewinsky an apology, President Clinton told NBC's Craig Melvin, "No, I do not -- I have never talked to her. But I did say publicly on more than one occasion that I was sorry. That's very different. The apology was public."

In an essay for Vanity Fair published earlier this year, Lewinsky said she was questioning the narrative surrounding the affair, which played a central role in Clinton's eventual impeachment.

"Now, at 44, I'm beginning (just beginning) to consider the implications of power differentials that were so vast between a president and a White House intern," she wrote. "I'm beginning to entertain the notion that in such a circumstance the idea of consent might well be rendered moot."

Following the interview, Lewinsky spoke out on Twitter, sharing her Vanity Fair essay and writing that she was "grateful to the myriad people who have helped me evolve + gain perspective in the past 20 years."

grateful to the myriad people who have helped me evolve + gain perspective in the past 20 years.

worth reposting this today from @VanityFair ...https://t.co/u9Ta13Alz3

— Monica Lewinsky (@MonicaLewinsky) June 4, 2018

Clinton publicly acknowledged at the National Prayer Breakfast in 1998 that he had "sinned."

"I don't think there is a fancy way to say that I have sinned. It is important to me that everybody who has been hurt know that the sorrow I feel is genuine -- first and most important, my family, also my friends, my staff, my Cabinet, Monica Lewinsky and her family, and the American people."

As for his affair with Lewinksy, Clinton told NBC, "this was litigated 20 years ago. Two-thirds of the American people sided with me."

(Source: CNN)

Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House review – tell-all burns all

Amid the daily din of Donald Trump’s White House comes Fire and Fury, Michael Wolff’s tell-all, just in time for the first anniversary of the Trump inaugural. Like the “burn book” in the movie Mean Girls, Fire and Fury contains a toxic tale that singes all.

In Wolff’s telling, Trump World is cacophonous and dysfunctional. Trump and those who work for him come across as all too happy to “share”, while loyalty is almost wholly absent from their landscape.

Trump purportedly mocks his own sons’ intellectual shortcomings and derides Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, as a suck-up. Melania Trump, the president’s third wife, cries in sorrow on election night over her husband’s electoral college win. Steve Bannon, Trump’s former senior adviser, pummels Jared and Ivanka, AKA Javanka, for their incredible lightness of being.

As to be expected, Bannon takes no prisoners and speaks with the loudest voice. He brands the now infamous June 2016 meeting at Trump Tower that was attended by a passel of Russians, Don Jr, Kushner and Paul Manafort, Trump’s then campaign manager who is now under indictment, as “treasonous”, “unpatriotic” and “bad shit”.

Bannon also sees special counsel Robert Mueller tightening his noose around the Oval Office. “I’m pretty good at coming up with solutions,” Wolff quotes Bannon as saying. “I came up with a solution for his broken-dick campaign in a day, but I don’t see this. I don’t see a plan for getting through.”

To his credit, Wolff catches the parallels between Bannon and Trump: “If Trump is incapable of sounding like a president, Bannon had matched him; he was incapable of sounding like a presidential aide.”

Trump’s circle of “friends”, family and acquaintances are depicted as no less unsparing in their criticisms of the president. According to Wolff, Rupert Murdoch called Trump “a fucking idiot” after the two men ended a phone call. Given the pending Fox-Disney deal, Murdoch may be wishing Fire and Fury dropped a few months later.

Sean Hannity, Trump’s staunchest ally on television, is audibly disturbed by Trump’s failure to offer condolences to the widow of Roger Ailes, Hannity’s former boss at Fox News. Hannity is caught saying: “What the fuck is wrong with him?”

In a similar vein, Tom Barrack, a 30-year Trump buddy, allegedly observed: “He’s not only crazy … he’s stupid.”

For the record, Barrack – who denied making that statement after the first excerpts of the book were published – chaired Trump’s inaugural, was according to Wolff considered for White House chief of staff, and brought Manafort into the campaign.

Even Javanka piles on. Upset by his father-in-law’s indecision over America’s response to Syria’s use of chemical weapons, Kushner complains that the president just doesn’t get it. As for Ivanka, she is reported to have mocked her father’s hair.

Fire and Fury also captures the ethno-religious tensions that have apparently marred Trump’s White House. Wolff quotes Henry Kissinger’s take on the feud between Kushner and Bannon as “a war between the Jews and non-Jews”. Here, Kissinger and Wolff likely overstate. But the backdrop of Pepe the Frog as a constant campaign meme, coupled with David Duke and white nationalist Richard Spencer’s man-crushes on Trump, leave the reader wondering.

Wolff’s access to Trump and his inner circle is evident. At the outset, Wolff writes of how he sat down with Trump in his Beverly Hills home, while Kushner and Trump aides Hope Hicks and Corey Lewandowski milled about. Likewise, the quotes obviously bespeak knowledge and close proximity.

Unlike Hillary Clinton, Trump represented a movement, and that fact deserved greater elucidation by Wolff. Said differently, among Fire and Fury’s shortcomings are its failure to adequately explain how Trump arrived at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and its insufficient appreciation for the bond forged by Trump and his base. In that sense, the book lacks the connective tissue present in Devil’s Bargain, Joshua Green’s take on the Trump campaign and the first few months of the presidency.

Clearly, Fire and Fury has set off a storm that has left its share of casualties. By Wednesday night, Bannon was on a political respirator and his role as keeper of the Trumpist flame was no more.

Steve Bannon listens as Donald Trump speaks to the press in the Cabinet Room of the White House. Photograph: Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images

In addition to being pummeled by the president, Bannon has reportedly been abandoned by the Mercer Family, his benefactors. Adding insult to injury, Michael Grimm, an ex-congressman convicted of tax evasion, disavowed Bannon’s support for his comeback. Bannon had gone from the leading voice of populism militant to a caricature. As for Trump, he has reminded the Faithful there shall be no others before Him.

The first amendment may also be tested. In addition to sending a cease-and-desist letter to Bannon for allegedly violating a non-disclosure agreement, Trump’s lawyers threw a legal brushback pitch at Wolff and Henry Holt, the book’s publisher. Without citing any particular false content, Team Trump threatened legal action in an attempt to halt publication.

Significantly, Trump’s lawyers did not cite national security as grounds for killing the book in its cradle. Rather, this fight is about honor and intimidation. Henry Holt responded by bringing publication forward to Friday. The book, the publisher claimed, is “an extraordinary contribution to our national discourse”.

Synchronously, Steven Spielberg’s movie, The Post, which portrays the Nixon administration’s unsuccessful attempt to block the Washington Post and the New York Times’ publication of the Pentagon Papers, is now in theaters. Ultimately, that episode became viewed as a prelude to Watergate and Richard Nixon’s downfall.

Make no mistake, Wolff’s latest is a must-read. It pulls away whatever curtain still cloaks the Trump White House, leaving those who know Trump best to do the talking.

(Source: The Guardian)

'Promise Me': Joe Biden on loss, grief and recovery

It hit him one day riding his bicycle on the hard sand at the beach during a family vacation. He had taken this ride plenty of times before.

But this time was different for Joe Biden.

"The Secret Service agents were well back, trailing me in their dune buggies," he writes. "Nobody else was around. And suddenly I remembered riding out to this very spot with Beau the last time he was down here with us. 'Dad,' he had said that day. 'Let's stop and sit down here.' And so we sat, the two of us, just breathing it in. 'Look, Dad, isn't it magnificent?' he had said. 'Isn't it beautiful?'

"And it was like I could hear him talking to me again. Dad, let's stop and sit down. I got off my bike and found myself standing at what felt like the edge of the earth — just ocean and beach and woodlands. It was magnificent. I found myself overwhelmed. I could feel my throat constrict. My breath came shorter and shorter. I turned my back to the agents, looked out at the vastness of the ocean to one side and the darkness of the woods to the other, sat down on the sand, and sobbed."

That's how the former vice president closes Chapter 10 of his new book, out Tuesday, Promise Me, Dad: A Year of Hope, Hardship, and Purpose. Biden recounts in vivid, heart-wrenching detail what it was like for him and his family from the time his eldest son, Beau, a rising star in the Democratic Party, was diagnosed with brain cancer, to his death less than two years later and the aftermath.

It's hard not to feel for Biden, who exudes humanity throughout the book. He lays bare his emotions and vulnerabilities at losing a son with so much promise, which is made even more difficult by the understanding that Biden has faced unthinkable tragedy before. As almost anyone reading this likely knows, when he was first elected as a U.S. senator from Delaware, Biden's young wife and daughter were killed in a car crash. His sons Beau and Hunter, 3 and 2 at the time, were in the back seat. They survived but were hospitalized for days. Joe Biden had just turned 30.

And now, four decades later, he was losing Beau, his trusted adviser. Biden writes that he was "pretty sure" Beau could have run for president one day. Biden describes Beau — who was attorney general of Delaware at the time of his diagnosis and set to run for governor — as like him, but better.

"Beau Biden, at age 45, was Joe Biden 2.0," Biden writes. "He had all the best of me, but with the bugs and flaws engineered out."

If former President Barack Obama's book was called Dreams from My Father, Biden's could have been Dreams Of My Son.

Joe Biden and his son, the late Beau Biden, embrace at the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver. Beau Biden delivered the keynote address that year. He died seven years later from brain cancer.

"Run, Joe, Run"
Biden weaves in his responsibilities as the right-hand man to the most powerful person in the world, then-President Obama, which included a hefty foreign-policy portfolio. It served as a powerful device in understanding just how much Biden was juggling, even if some of the detail about Ukrainian and Russian troop movements felt extraneous at times.

Biden was taking calls on secure lines in hospital rooms next to his son's while attempting to understand what was happening to Beau — and trying to keep it all private.

The possibility of running for president is a constant thread throughout the book and ties it together. Biden was considering it far more seriously than previously reported, and he had begun planning a run in the summer of 2013, he writes.

I was afraid I would be overwhelmed by emotion, and I think the audience could see it. I waved and hustled over to the car. This was no way for a presidential candidate to act in public."
Joe Biden in his book, "Promise Me, Dad," on tearing up in public a month after his son's death
Electoral politics is never far behind in Promise Me. The last chapter of the book, in which he reveals why he didn't run, is even titled, "Run, Joe, Run." He takes the reader inside the deliberations, right up to the point of his 11th-hour decision not to run — something that went against Beau's wishes.

Biden was actually all set to run. By October 2015, Biden was even editing his announcement speech. It laid out a vision that was different from the grievance politics presented by Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders — and more hopeful than the technocratic plans laid out by Hillary Clinton.

He had also assembled a team that was not just made up of his inner circle. It included some top Obama staffers, like communications adviser Anita Dunn and Bob Bauer, one of the top Democratic elections lawyers in the country. He had Obama's Ohio field director, a top South Carolina adviser and a list of people ready to endorse.

Even George Clooney volunteered to help with fundraising.

Five months after Beau's death, and with Clinton struggling to get past her email server controversy, Biden had some goodwill — and political momentum.

But he decided against it. He knew in his heart he wasn't ready.

There was the time earlier in the summer, for example, on the tarmac in Colorado, where he was set to speak at a pair of Democratic fundraisers, when someone called out that they had served with Beau.

Biden teared up and had to leave.

"I felt a lump rise in my throat," Biden writes. "My breathing suddenly became shallower and my voice cracked. I was afraid I would be overwhelmed by emotion, and I think the audience could see it. I waved and hustled over to the car.

"This was no way for a presidential candidate to act in public."

Having been through this before, he says, he knew the second year can be harder than the first. And if he did win the nomination, he didn't want to put his family through that — even though his family was behind him and pushing him to run.

"[W]e all believed I was best equipped to finish the job Barack and I had started," Biden writes. "If Beau had never gotten sick, we would already be running. This was something we would have done together."

He adds, "[T]he idea of not running started to feel like letting him down, like letting everybody down." But "grief is a process that respects no schedule and no timetable."

Frosty relationship with Clinton
This is not a score-settling memoir, but it's clear there's no love lost between Biden and Clinton.

Joe Biden looks back at Hillary Clinton during a rally for Clinton in August 2016, three months before the presidential election. Biden writes in his new book he was very close to running himself.

Beau wanted his father to run — not as falsely reported, Biden writes, as a death-bed wish. And it certainly was not he who leaked the apocryphal story to The New York Times, he points out, because it wasn't true. The Times eventually appended a formal correction, Biden notes.

Instead, Biden suspects the "opposition" — and in this case, that's Hillary Clinton's campaign — of being responsible for the Times story. Some of Clinton's staff had become aggressive in their approach to his team about Biden's intentions, he writes. At first, Biden says, they inquired genially. But as the months wore on, and Clinton's prospects dimmed — with poll numbers between her and Sanders closing in early states — they began to argue that he couldn't win.

Finally, they attempted to make the case, as Clinton appeared more vulnerable, that Biden would wind up splitting the vote and handing the nomination to Sanders.

Even former President Bill Clinton, who had once praised the 1994 crime bill that Biden authored, was "now calling [the bill] a big mistake," Biden writes.

In reality, Clinton was getting pushback on the campaign trail from Black Lives Matters protesters, but Biden interpreted the Clintons attempting to put distance between themselves and the legislation as a direct slap at him and a way to show how they could go after his record.

None of that intimidated Biden, he says. He writes that he relished the underdog role, and, at age 72, he certainly didn't care what the Clinton machine thought of him. All that mattered was what his family thought.

Biden describes a pretty frosty relationship with Clinton. After building up his relationship with President Obama, Biden writes about the February 2015 morning Clinton came to tell him she was running — and wanted to know if he was running, too:

"She and I used to have regular meetings in that room when she was secretary of state and came over for breakfast to get my take on how she was doing with the president. Barack was a tough boss to read, especially for people who didn't spend much time around him, so I think she used me as her Obama whisperer. But Hillary had an entirely new agenda that February morning, and she got right to it."
Translation: Obama is my friend, not yours.

If that didn't make it clear enough that Biden and Clinton weren't very close, he notes, "I didn't feel like I could tell her the truth about Beau."

And as she's leaving, Biden writes:

"I felt a twinge of sadness for Hillary as I watched her walk down the steps that morning. ... [S]he did not evince much joy at the prospect of running. I may have misread her entirely that morning, but she seemed to me like a person propelled by forces not entirely of her own making."
Et tu, Barack?

Despite his friendship and fondness for President Obama, Biden is fairly convinced that Obama was trying to edge him out of the race.

Then-President Obama awards the rare honor of the Medal of Freedom with distinction to then-Vice President Biden in January. It brought Biden to tears

Obama, Biden writes, continued to press him — albeit gently — at their lunches about whether he was running. Obama did so about half a dozen times in 2015, even days after Beau died and more insistently later in the year as the early primaries got closer.

Biden says Obama was "convinced I could not beat Hillary" and even asked Biden to talk with his political advisers — some of whom were already working for Clinton — for a reality check.

Days after Beau died, Biden writes that Obama asked again:

" 'What are you going to do,' he asked, 'about running.' I explained that I had not entirely set aside the idea of running. ... And then I found myself saying, 'Look, Mr. President, I understand if you've made an explicit commitment to Hillary and to Bill Clinton,' but I assured Barack that if I decide to run I would engage Hillary on our policy differences only and not on questions of character or personality that might weaken her if she won the nomination. 'I promise you,' I said. And we left it at that."

That wasn't the end of it, especially as the months wore on, and Biden still hadn't made a decision. Biden takes note that "Barack was seen playing a round of golf with Bill Clinton" on Martha's Vineyard, that stories were popping up with donors saying they were "unifying around Hillary" and "a couple of people on President Obama's political team were telling us the race just wasn't winnable for me."

Biden writes that Obama gave Clinton "what seemed like a coordinated, nonendorsement endorsement" when she announced.

Despite all that, Biden still seemed determined to run. "Beau believed, as I did, that I was prepared to take on the presidency," Biden writes. "That there was nobody better prepared. No matter what people in the outside world said or thought, Beau and Hunter believed we could win. ... So the 2016 Biden campaign would have a late start. So what? If Beau made it through the next few months and came out alive, I knew we could do this."

"Emotional rollercoaster"

The scene on the beach took place at Kiawah Island, S.C. Beau had died less than a month earlier. The Biden family had a regular vacation to the island, but there were questions among the family about whether they would make the trip this year given Beau's death.

The vice president insisted they make the trip. He remembered from the last time he faced stinging tragedy that sticking to routines and family traditions was important and helpful.

"I knew from past experience," Biden writes, "that as hard as it would be, it was better to go through it than to avoid it."

The trip to South Carolina, however, was interrupted by a different, national-attention-capturing tragedy. It became what Biden described as "even more of an emotional rollercoaster than I had anticipated."

During that trip, the mass shooting at a Charleston church happened, where a white supremacist opened fire and killed nine parishioners during Bible study at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, known as Mother Emanuel.

Biden was just 45 minutes south and decided to go to the scene — and comfort however he could.

"The act of consoling had always made me feel a little better," Biden writes, "and I was hungry to feel better."

Vice President Biden attends a memorial service in Statuary Hall on Capitol Hill in 2010.

Biden takes a certain pride in comforting those who have faced tragedy.

"I also know from experience," he told the widow of Rafael Ramos, one of the New York police officers assassinated in their squad car in the aftermath of the Eric Garner killing, in his eulogy, "that the time will come, the time will come when Rafael's memory will bring a smile to your lips before it brings a tear to your eyes. That's when you know — it's going to be OK. I know it's hard to believe it will happen, but I promise you, I promise you it will happen."

It's a line he's repeated countless times, Biden writes. He even tells the story of how he comforted the widow and father of Ramos' partner, 32-year-old Wenjian Liu. He gave Sanny Liu, Wenjian's widow, his private number. He told her that when all of the people who are now supporting her go away, she could call him if she needs someone to talk to. Biden writes that he has given his private number to dozens of family members of victims, and some do call.

In those scenes, it's hard not to think of how Biden's approach to the grieving differs so greatly to that of President Trump, who recently struggled to console a Gold Star mother and instead landed in controversy.

(The word "Trump," by the way, is one that goes unmentioned in Biden's 260 pages, despite noting in the epilogue that he was writing it in the summer of 2017. It seems likely that keeping Trump out of the book was a deliberate decision, especially considering how much Biden writes about the 2016 race.)

Biden writes that he knew the pastor at Mother Emanuel, Clementa Pinckney. He was a state senator with a bright future. At 41, he was younger than Beau. He was killed that night, as his wife and 6-year-old daughter hid in his office.

On his office wall, Pinckney had a photo of him and Biden, smiling together. "Now he was gone," Biden writes.

After choking back tears and keeping a brave face through Beau's illness — even forcing himself to smile before rounding the final corner to Beau's hospital room — the weight of it all finally proved too much for Biden. After being at Mother Emanuel, he headed back to Kiawah Island and broke down on the beach.

"[P]romise me, Dad, that no matter what happens, you're going to be all right. Give me your word, Dad, that you're going to be all right," Beau insisted to his father before the worst of his sickness hit him. "Promise me, Dad."

"I'm going to be okay, Beau," Biden responded.

"No, Dad," Beau said. "Give me your word as a Biden. Give me your word, Dad. Promise me, Dad."

"I promised," Biden writes.

So will he run in 2020?

Biden is writing this book, it seems, for multiple purposes. It's clearly cathartic. He needs a purpose and something to do, as he notes.

That's part of it. But he's clearly conscious of the goodwill he received after Beau's death. He notes that he got a lot of attention, more than perhaps he expected, after an emotional appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert in September 2015. That seemed to accelerate his planning for a 2016 run before he realized he simply could not do it.

It's not clear what the former vice president wants to do next or whether he wants to run for president in 2020. He will be 77 before Election Day 2020, but he's clearly leaving his options open. And by writing a book — and doing a healthy round of interviews, including with NPR — on the very topic that gave him all that goodwill, Biden keeps his name and the good feelings out there in case he does want to make a run.

At least four places in the book could hold clues that Biden will still consider running:

1. The Mario Cuomo no-regrets lesson. He describes a day in July 2015 when he spent some five hours with New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a publicly declared Clinton supporter at the time. His father, Mario, died earlier that year, too. Biden writes:

"What Andrew did express to me that day at the end of July was that his father never truly made peace with declining to seek the presidency. 'Whatever decision you make, make sure you won't regret it,' he told me. 'Because you'll live with it the rest of your life.'"
It's worth noting, however, that Biden has run for president twice before. Once in 1988, when he bowed out because of a plagiarism scandal and then in 2008, when he finished fifth in Iowa and sixth in New Hampshire.

2. "Something to hope for." At the beginning of the book, before the title page, Biden includes the following quote from Immanuel Kant:

"Rules for happiness: something to do, someone to love, something to hope for."
3. Not "giving up on Beau." Biden writes of thinking about not running in 2016:

"[T]he question of running for president was all tangled up in Beau, and purpose and hope. Giving up on the presidential race would be like saying we were giving up on Beau."
4. "Change the country" and "nostalgic for the future." Biden bookends the Kant quote with his last few lines of his epilogue:

"So how do I want to spend the rest of my life? I want to spend as much time with my family, and I want to help change the country and the world for the better. That duty does much more than give me purpose; it gives me something to hope for. It makes me nostalgic for the future."
Could that be a presidential run?

"I'm not closing the door," Biden told NBC's Today show on Monday. "I've been around too long. I'm a great respecter of fate, but who knows what the situation is going to be in a year and a half?"

Don't be shocked if he decides to give it a go.

After all, as Biden himself has said, "My Mom used to have an expression — she'd say, 'As long as you're alive, you have an obligation to strive, and you're not dead until you've seen the eyes of God.' And the truth of the matter is I think that's the Irish of it."

(Source: NPR)

Hillary Clinton's record: 13 days, 44,000 km trip!

If diplomatic achievements were measured by the number of countries visited, Hillary Rodham Clinton would be the most accomplished secretary of state in history.

While historians will debate and eventually rate her tenure as America’s top diplomat, Clinton is already assured of a place in the State Department record book.

The former first lady has completed an epic 13-day journey of 27,000 miles (43,450 kilometres), about 2,000 miles (3220 kilometres) more than the circumference of the Earth, through and over Europe to Asia and then doubling back to the Middle East.

One well-travelled Clinton staffer described the France-Afghanistan-Japan-Mongolia-Vietnam-Laos- Cambodia-Egypt-Israel itinerary as “especially absurd, even for us.” Despite the mind- and body-numbing time zone hopping, Clinton joked that she was ready for more. “I appreciate being here, I am only sorry that I have to leave,” she told reporters on her last stop Monday, in Israel. “My travelling team is anxious to get home. I’d like to be hanging out in Jerusalem, but, you know, I have to do my duty,” she said with a sigh.

Since becoming secretary of state in 2009, Clinton has logged 351 days on the road, travelled to 102 countries and flown a whopping 843,839 miles, according to the State Department.

While some previous secretaries may have flown more miles mainly due to shuttling back and forth to the Mideast on peace missions none has visited more nations.

Clinton broke that record last month, eclipsing Madeleine Albright’s total of 98, when she travelled to Finland for number 99 and then hit the 100 mark in Latvia.

Not content, she tacked on another two countries Mongolia and Laos, where she was the first secretary of state to visit in 57 years and only the second ever on her latest trip.

And she has another six months to go before she reaches her self-imposed deadline to step down and take a breather.

Even with a bed on the plane and her uncanny ability to sleep mid-flight, the gruelling schedule can take its toll. Clinton suffered a rare coughing fit as she finished a speech before the US Chamber of Commerce in Hanoi.

And while she insisted that she would have preferred to stay all day as birds sang in Kabul’s presidential place, she rushed away when Afghan President Hamid Karzai suggested taking additional questions.

Arriving in Egypt this weekend after a flight from Cambodia, Clinton and her staff literally didn’t know what time it was.

BlackBerrys automatically reset their times to what should have been Cairo time, except it wasn’t, so the staff set their clocks to Sarajevo time.

Several hours later, the reason for the discrepancy was discovered: Egypt opted out of daylight saving time this year.

Clinton tells anyone who asks that she won’t be staying on if President Barack Obama wins a second term not surprising, given that only one secretary of state has served more than four years since the 1970s.

And after a bruising fight with Obama for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, she likes to say she won’t be returning to the political stage.

But with her popularity at an all-time high and the Democrats in likely need of a 2016 candidate regardless of whether Obama is reelected, there is widespread speculation that she would find a second stab at becoming first female president irresistible.

(Source: AP)