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This Isn't War


Now, it seems reasonable to ask why these people (many with personal aircraft ready to go anywhere at a moment’s notice) would sit still for panels of substantial tedium—the environment, the breakdown of trust in business, the U.N. and its relevance, etc. Most panels, at that, were restatements of views that, if you read the New York Times, you knew already.

But possibly, it was exactly this reassuring familiarity that was the point. This is the liberal-Establishment comfort zone.

My panel—with Kinsley and Alter and Pat Mitchell, who runs PBS, and Ann Moore, the CEO of Time Inc.—was, naturally, the media panel: “Have Journalists Sold Out?” It was supposed to be moderated by Walter, but he traded it for another panel because he was, he joked, trying to get away from media. And, indeed, here, media was not a glamour subject. Nor was it a subject invoking any sort of heatedness or bitterness. There was even the sense, for all its various problems—consolidation, Fox (everybody said Murdoch’s name with great scorn), the mess at AOL Time Warner—of the media’s being, well, safely and proudly fair-minded (despite the conservative noisiness).



The state of the world might be bad, but there was a sense here of the brainpower to make it better. Throughout the three days, as a sort of punctuation, there were individual essaylike speeches on solving specific world problems by people such as Larry Summers, president of Harvard, and Anna Deavere Smith, the playwright who plays the national-security adviser on The West Wing, and Sherron Watkins, the Enron whistle-blower, and Queen Noor.

And then there were the really big, “plenary” issues, like “The Future of the Middle East.” And while one person in this relatively international audience did point out that there were no Arabs here to discuss this topic, everybody seemed pretty satisfied with the views. Nobody suggested that what was being said was just the same old stuff.

As a special feature of the conference, David Kirkpatrick did a one-on-one interview with President Paul Kagame of Rwanda, who has managed his nation’s transformation from genocidal chaos to its current relative calm. (The room filled up with various Rwandans—staff and security people—which seemed just a little scary.) Kagame, who was presented as a kind of African overachiever, was prodded by Kirkpatrick to explore the experience of genocide, but he seemed relatively remote from or even uninterested in the subject.

The psychic heart of the conference was Bill Clinton.

He was interviewed on the second day by Isaacson, who began by telling a story about how when he was a Rhodes scholar he’d done a paper that his Oxford professor had said was not at all in the same league as a similar paper written by a certain Rhodes scholar from Arkansas a few years before. This was one of those overachievement-upon-overachievement stories that was bound to subdue anyone.

Clinton had lost weight and—with a great collection of just-out-of-the-wrapper pastel-colored polo shirts on view throughout the conference—seemed in fabulous form. He was in campaign mode but without the restraints of campaign mode. While there was clear bitterness on his part toward the successor who had rushed “to undo everything I’d done,” and the Republicans who “will run over you unless you beat their brains out,” there was a feisty humor too. Of the disputed Harken oil deal, Clinton said Bush had “sold the stock to buy the baseball team which got him the governorship which got him the presidency.”




There was a party on the second day for Clinton at the Aspen version of Nobu, and then, later that evening, a discussion between Clinton and President Kagame, hosted by the William Morris Agency, at Whiskey Rocks Bar in the St. Regis Hotel (Michael Eisner, the Disney CEO, while not a conference attendee, slipped into the room).



And that something more than overachieving might be required to take back the power—and for Walter to get his next job.


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