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16 ESCAPE FROM THE CAPITAL My productive time inWashington,D.C.,really ended in the months preceding Jean’s death on April 24, 1996. I continued my consulting business and WashingtonIntelligence advisory service and otherwise attempted to proceed as usual. I turned down a meeting with associates of Russian president Boris Yeltsin to discuss my spending weeks in Moscow to advise his reelection campaign.From the beginning of 1996, when it became evident that Jean’s brave battle against bone cancer was nearing its end,I spent most hours,day and night,at her side. When she departed, the funeral chapel was filled with fellow teachers and administrators from Primary Day School, parents of the children she had lovingly nurtured, and others whose lives she had touched. My children, grandchildren,and I buried her in a suburban cemetery,as she had requested, near my parents’ grave. My name was placed on the headstone, next to hers, in anticipation of our reunion later. I was not fully myself for the next year and a half I spent in the capital. I continued to work and to write. I traveled twice to participate at conferences at Oxford University sponsored by one of my clients, Oxford Analytica .But,evenings and weekends,I found myself sitting alone in our big house in Potomac,gazing at the empty chair Jean had occupied in her final months. I divided most of our belongings among our four children and gave most books and clothing to charity. Our daughters Terry and Sue held a yard sale to dispose of remaining items. I sold the house and moved what remained into a two-bedroom apartment in Maryland at the District of Columbia line. I badly needed something to bring me back to life and make me feel useful. In mid-1997, after Clinton’s reelection, I sent a private note to Sandy Berger,his national security advisor,expressing a willingness to take on some important but seemingly insoluble task confronting the administration. I reminded Sandy, in my note, that I had endorsed Dole for president the previous fall and, moreover, had supported Tsongas rather than Clinton for the 1992 Democratic presidential nomination. Berger, to my surprise, responded immediately and enthusiastically. I was badly needed, he said. Anyone who 245 knew me understood my Dole endorsement. He would get back to me promptly suggesting a foreign-policy-related option or two. A short while later I received a second note from Berger saying he had encountered unexpected (by him) resistance to the idea—I presumed from Clinton. However, if I wanted him to do so, he would actively try to overcome the resistance.I responded that he should use none of his internal political capital on my behalf. It had probably been a bad idea in the first place. It was. I recognized that escape from grief and depression was not the right motive to seek service in the administration of a president whom I doubted. (Later,as Clinton’s second-term troubles fully flowered,I could see how truly bad the idea would have been.) Then, as had happened so often in my life, change came from an unexpected source. During my time at Weyerhaeuser, nearly twenty years before, I had worked with Donald Straszheim, who subsequently had left the company and become chief economist at Merrill Lynch in New York. He had been an early subscriber to my Washington Intelligence service. In 1997 Straszheim left Merrill Lynch to become president of the Milken Institute, a nonprofit economic policy think tank in Santa Monica, California , founded and chaired by Michael Milken, the brilliant and controversial financier who had spent time in prison in the early 1990s for securities-law violations and had subsequently turned to philanthropy. Straszheim was an economist and knew financial markets,but he had no prior experience in public policy or in running a policy institute. I had both. I thus took on a consulting role in which I helped him organize the institute and frame its agenda. I met and enjoyed working with Milken,who was prohibited by law from pursuing his former profession in the securities industry.Despite his great wealth, he and his family continued to live in the San Fernando Valley neighborhood where he had grown up. His closest personal staª and advisors were fiercely loyal to him;he had known many of them since boyhood,and they were,without exception,straight-shooting,open people.I found that the political,business...

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