Family Vacation Ends For Clinton Refreshed President Wishes For Another Three Weeks
Ending the longest vacation of his presidency, a family time far from the tumult of the capital, President Clinton can look back on weeks of rest and golf and the unexpected task of leading the nation’s mourning for two of the world’s most famous women.
On arrival in Edgartown, a former whaling port turned elite tourist mecca on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, Clinton nudged the Teamsters Union and the United Parcel Service to settle their disruptive strike. They soon complied.
That business behind him, he settled into a borrowed house on Oyster Pond and a routine that eventually included a dozen celebrity-studded parties and restaurant dinners, including a clambake for his 51st birthday thrown by television actors Ted Danson and his wife, Mary Steenburgen.
When Katharine Graham of The Washington Post invited the Clintons to dinner at her summer home they stayed past one o’clock in the morning.
As in all Clinton outings, the staple was golf, golf and more golf.
Clinton played for 48-1/2 hours over 10 of his vacation days for a total 180 holes. According to one unofficial record-keeper, Mark Knoller of CBS News, his average score for those games where the results are known was 82.73.
The president gets personal and intense over golf. In one early game he personalized his golf ball, calling it “Alice,” as in “C’mon, Alice!”
He often offered golfers’ excuses when a ball landed in a sandtrap or caromed into the rough.
When one drive off the first tee at Farm Neck Golf Club in Oak Bluffs fell into the woods, he said it “just got tired.”
Clinton had one public event, a back-to-school session at Oak Bluffs Elementary School that he used to try to build support for the proposed performance testing he seeks for fourth- and eighth-graders to gauge new educational standards in reading and math.
The Clintons were enjoying a clambake on the beach a week ago Saturday night when rumors, increasing like a rapidly rising tide, began to spread that Princess Diana and her friend, Dodi Fayed, had been seriously hurt in a car crash in Paris.
Clinton was on the golf course on Friday, nearly a week later, when word came of the death of 87-year-old Mother Teresa.
The first lady flew to London to represent the nation at Diana’s funeral.
And Clinton used his weekly radio address to link the lives of two apparently disparate people, an elegant princess and a selfless nun.
“Each of them in her own way has shown what it is to live a life of meaning through concern for others,” the president said.
With his wife in London, Clinton took their 17-year-old daughter, Chelsea, out on the town Friday evening and again on Saturday morning.
Clinton has said repeatedly that the vacation had special meaning for him because it is the last family vacation before Chelsea enrolls on “her educational adventure” as a freshman at Stanford University in California.
Father and daughter played 18 holes of miniature golf Friday night, then dined together in an Edgartown restaurant. They had lunch on Saturday in Vineyard Haven, then shopped for souvenirs and gifts for friends.
Clinton often shook hands along the rope lines that kept back the crowds that gathered when he was spotted. At one, a woman cast an eye over his recently slimmed figure and said, “I thought he was bigger than that.”
The local newspaper, the Vineyard Gazette, editorialized that Clinton was leaving “clearly looking more relaxed and refreshed than when he first arrived three weeks ago.”
And Clinton’s own summing up was to the point.
“Wish it went on another three weeks,” he said.