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Clinton, cameras and cigars don’t mix |
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Reporter Orla Healy of The Independent of Dublin, Ireland was one of the troupe of media who was part of a preview of the new exhibition “Annie Leibovitz: A Photographer’s Life” which opened this week in Washington, D.C.
She wrote that one of the portraits which drew considerable media interest was her 1993 shot of the newly-sworn-in Bill Clinton. According to Healy:
“Leibovitz talked about arriving in the Oval Office to shoot Bill Clinton during his first days in his new job.
“When I walked in, he was smoking a cigar and had his feet up on his desk,” she said, adding that when she asked him if he'd like to have the lit cigar in the shot, he replied, “Not in your wildest dreams.” Cracking how “a different kind of cigar obviously became famous later,” the openly liberal Leibovitz admitted she now wistfully views the 1993 photo as “a picture of promise and a picture of regret . . . a picture of all the things that we were promised that we didn't get.”
Leibovitz makes a worthwhile point. Although an admitted cigar smoker, has anyone ever seen a picture of Clinton with a cigar?
Clinton did make gifts of cigars occasionally. Former Republican Senator and current Presidential candidate Fred Thompson received a cigar from Clinton in 1997 that’s now part of his archive housed at the University of Tennessee.
According to a story in the Knoxville News-Sentinel, Thompson wrote to Clinton with thanks for a cigar Clinton sent to him and noted “I had a fight with my staff as to whether I should smoke the cigar or keep it as a memento from the President. We compromised. I am
keeping the tube it came in.”
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 24 October 2007 )
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