Joe Klein's European Listening Tour
Joe Klein is a staff writer for The New Yorker. He is traveling in Europe for the London Guardian, where a version of this article first appeared.
Today's itinerary: Rome, Silvio Berlusconi's house
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StumbleUponIf, as Michael Kinsley famously suggested, the gaffe is what happens when a politician accidentally tells the truth, what then is the formal interview? Quite the opposite, I suspect. It's certainly a difficult form for a journalist to master. Confrontation is almost always a disaster. Charm is useless (and how many charming journalists have you met?). With Berlusconi, I will try jujitsu. Perhaps if I go with his strength—party-giving—I will be able to look into his soul (as my president has claimed to be able to do with Vladimir Putin). We are to meet in his private residence, which is, of course, stupendous, on a street near the Piazza Venezia, where Mussolini used to rant from a balcony.
Berlusconi seems to anticipate my strategy. He provides interpreter Christine and me with vanilla ice cream as we wait for him. I have heard that President Bush loved the ice cream prepared by Berlusconi's chef, Michele Persechini. My first question will take off from there.
He doesn't keep us waiting long. He sweeps in, smiling, dressed less ostentatiously than Cofferati (gray suit, blue shirt, navy polka-dot tie with tiny dots). I had anticipated some horrible perfume, but he isn't wearing any. His old friend Confalonieri, down from Milan, is there, and several other aides. We move from a waiting room, with ceilings that appear higher than the millennium wheel, to an office, with similar ceilings, and also tapestries, and a gigantic, undistinguished Renaissance painting by an unknown hand. We sit on cushy couches around a rough-cut marble table. "I was speaking to Lady Thatcher a few years ago," he says immediately, taking control of things. "She told me that she'd had 74 staff members at 10 Downing Street. Tony Blair had increased the number to 120. When I arrived here, I found 4,500 staff members. We've reduced that to 3,000."
"I understand that it's difficult to fire people in Italy," I say.
He ignores me, produces a tri-colored chart—"Primary colors," he jokes—with the status of all 170 pieces of legislation he has filed. He begins an extended dissertation on the difficulties of passing legislation, of doing any sort of reform. "Macchiavelli said that reform is the most dangerous thing a leader can attempt," he says—and, as he pauses, I manage to insert my incredibly puny question about Bush and the ice cream.
"Yes, he loved it. Everyone loved it. I was standing with Putin at the ceremonies. Three jet fighters came trailing red, white, and green smoke. Putin asked, 'Is this a military exercise?' I replied, 'No, it's the menu.' Everything was tricolore. The starter, the pasta, the ice cream."
He doesn't want to linger on the party arrangements, though. He wants to talk about the pact with Russia and about Putin. "I had a very sincere conversation with Putin at the G8 meetings in Genoa. I saw his great worries about what would happen if the Americans abandoned the ABM treaty and if NATO was expanded. Russia felt surrounded. He was afraid that some of his colleagues were looking east, toward China, for an alliance. He was very concerned. And I thought, should I take a part in resolving this or not? I worked with all our partners and with the American administration. I went to Moscow and talked to Putin for two days. At the end, a telephone call with Bush was arranged, and the decision was reached."
He went on about the details of the plan and of his hopes to arrange $10 billion in aid to the Russians over the next 10 years. Eventually I was able to change the topic and ask him about the general shift toward the right in Europe. "Yes, there have been lousy results on the part of the Socialists. Tony Blair is doing well because he has essentially followed Thatcher's path. You have to distinguish between the moderate left and the left left. Communism was a good idea with bad results. And there is great trauma to reforming a Communist regime. Gorbachev came to visit me at my home when he was president of the Soviet Union, and he asked many questions. I was so pleased that he has opened his mind to new possibilities. Finally, I was escorting him and Raisa in to dinner, and he says, 'There's one thing I don't understand, which authority fixes the prices?' "
Berlusconi smiles, but does not laugh at his own story. He is not quite larger than life one-on-one. But he is in command, and before he moves on, I sneak in a question about his own market-oriented reforms. I ask if Cofferati has beaten him on Article 18.
He doesn't say no. He says, "It's much easier to say 'I'm going to defend your job' than to say 'Your contract that says you can't be fired isn't a right, it's a privilege less than one-third of all workers in Italy have.' "
At this point, and for an extended period thereafter, he discusses his reforms, his budget, his successes, his plans. He is trying to convince me—contrary to the line from the left—that he is deeply involved in the details of governance and that he is succeeding with his plan. This is the sort of argument that is impossible for a visiting journalist from America to evaluate. But I assume that since he can't point to any grand victories—merely a series of bills passed and plans made—he hasn't had the success he'd like. I try from time to time to ask more questions, but he is undeterred. He brings out the contract he made with the Italian people in the election, and ticks off, one by one, the promises he's kept. He brings out his budget. After an hour, an aide tells him he must move on. He talks for another half hour.
In the end, he tells this story: "I was in Naples recently, 300,000 people came to hear me speak. I spoke for an hour and 20 minutes; they called me out—Silvio! Silvio!—for four more encores. I was exhausted. I decided to stop in Naples for a pizza before I came home. We went to a restaurant and I heard a fabulous voice singing, a man with a guitar. I asked him to sing a very difficult song, 500 years old, and he sang it. He said he knew thousands of songs. 'Do you ever write any yourself?' I asked. He said yes and sang three of them. The voice and the music were beautiful. The lyrics were terrible. I told him, 'I'll write some lyrics for you.' So, for 10 consecutive Saturday nights he came here, to my home, after midnight and we wrote 10 songs. We've made a CD. We're going to sell it for charity."
The immediate question about any colorful politician is: Rogue or scoundrel? Clinton was a rogue. Nixon, a scoundrel. And Berlusconi? I suspect that he may have been a scoundrel when he built his business. It is possible, now that he doesn't need any more money, that he has slipped into mere roguery—manipulative, certainly; egomaniacal, of course; but he is also essentially correct about the need to reform the economy and, if Italy is lucky, too wealthy to be truly corrupt. Confalonieri followed me out and asked, "So what do you think?"
"If I were a Martian," I said, "and I visited Cofferati and then this man, and you asked me, which one is the labor leader and which is the president …"
He started laughing and interrupted me. "I know exactly what you're going to say."
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Notes From the Fray Editor:
As Klein's listening tour wraps up, he has come in for much more grumpiness for traveling around Europe "on someone else's dime." Still, Faustus's post on the ICC started a nice little debate between Bracque and j thatcher here. And the post by Cato the Censor began an interesting argument about diversity, conservatism and what used to be called "The American Progress."
Notes From the Fray:
One thing that occurred to me while reading about the differences between the US and Europe is our conservative movement here. Our conservatives seem to have more ideas than nationalism. Our conservatives also seem to be much more vital, and have opinions and prescriptions on a whole range of problems.
Although I am not a conservative, I can appreciate the importance that strain of thought has had upon the US. I think that we were trapped in our own version of anomie during the Carter administration. For reasons that are not at all clear to me, the conservatives seem to have gone into hiding in the 1960's, and didn't really re-emerge until the late 1970's. While I don't think that Reagan really did anything of note as President, I do credit him with re-vitalizing the conservative movement. The conservative revival, which seems to have crested and is now beginning to wane, will in turn have rejuvenated the liberals, who were in great need of rejuvenating.
-- Cato the Censor
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(7/5)