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"    To most Americans, the spectacle of Clint Eastwood addressing the Republican National Convention was strange and baffling, even inexplicable. Why would Clint Eastwood, who has been so protective over the years of the image he has manufactured in Hollywood, suddenly cash it in service to a politician looking to assume power in Washington? Why would he allow himself to descend, in front of an audience of millions, into a halting, geriatric incoherence, with an invisible chair yet? Well, I had met Clint Eastwood just a month earlier for the purpose of writing the cover story for the October issue of Esquire, and I thought I knew why. First of all, he has an invisible chair of his own, in his office on the Warner Brothers lot. Secondly, he really doesn&amp;#039;t like Obama. And thirdly, as he had grown old, he was waging the same fight to protect his image as he always had \u2014 to invoke what I, in my story, call his &amp;quot;epic right of refusal.&amp;quot; He was just failing. My experience with Clint was as follows: I was sitting in his office, waiting for him to come in from Esquire&amp;#039;s photo shoot. His assistant came in and told me that I was sitting in &amp;quot;the place where Clint really feels comfortable.&amp;quot; I looked around. There were two couches in the office, and I was sitting at the end of one of them. I said, &amp;quot;He has a special seat? I&amp;#039;m sitting in Archie Bunker&amp;#039;s chair?&amp;quot; She smiled and said, &amp;quot;Well, you can sit there as long as you like. But when Clint comes in, you should probably get up. You&amp;#039;re sitting in the place where he feels comfortable.&amp;quot; Then he came in, tall and rangy as ever, but also creaky, with his voice not only roughened but softened with age, at once unmistakable but also slightly more anonymous, one of its kind \u2014 an old man&amp;#039;s voice \u2014 rather than absolutely singular. I handed him an article I wrote, on the subject of Obama and killing, because I wanted to talk to him about killing during the interview. But he looked at the picture, and wanted to talk to me about Obama. &amp;quot;There are two kinds of people in this world,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;&amp;#039;I&amp;#039; people and &amp;#039;we&amp;#039; people. I&amp;#039;ve always tried to be a &amp;#039;we&amp;#039; person. I think that our president is an &amp;#039;I&amp;#039; person. He speaks as though he killed Osama bin Laden himself.&amp;quot; He sat down in his special seat on the couch, Archie Bunker&amp;#039;s chair, and I talked to him for over three hours. At first, I couldn&amp;#039;t get over how frail and even vulnerable he seemed \u2014 he was Clint Eastwood, after all, and he played a man capable of doing damage to other men even in Gran Torino and the new Trouble with the Curve, movies which are also about aging. But he was famous for not rehearsing, and he warmed up after a slow start, especially on the subject of killing. When he spoke about killing, he still looked very much like a man capable of the act \u2014 like the Clint Eastwood we have always known \u2014 and when he spoke about the death penalty, he wasn&amp;#039;t only clearly in favor of it: he was clearly in favor of every man being in favor of it, in the event of a heinous crime. &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s not a guy in the world that wouldn&amp;#039;t want to drop the hammer on them. But in our society you have certain people trying to analyze what we give them for lethal injection. What&amp;#039;s the difference? Battery acid would be fine.&amp;quot; In light of Tampa, people have asked me if he was cogent during the interview. He was absolutely cogent during the interview, though he took a certain relish in the extremity of his death-penalty position \u2014 he smiled after expounding on the virtues of battery acid \u2014 and it was clear that he was not so far from the character he played in Gran Torino, the crusty codger whose rhetoric turned out to be largely for effect. He was still battling to control his image, and spoke at length about the efforts he took to make sure that the advertisement he made for Chrysler on the occasion of the last Super Bowl \u2014 &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s halftime in America&amp;quot; \u2014 did not reduce him to the status of &amp;quot;pitchman.&amp;quot; But though he bristled at mention of the reality television show Mrs. Eastwood and Daughters \u2014 &amp;quot;I have nothing to do with that,&amp;quot; he said, and sounded almost like the the Clint Eastwood of the screen \u2014 he conceded that it&amp;#039;s become harder for anyone to succeed at image control in this day and age the way he has over the last 40 years. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m not a reality-TV kind of guy,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;But it&amp;#039;s almost like we&amp;#039;re living in a reality show. Every day in this country, everybody keeps worrying about the deterioration of America and it&amp;#039;s like a big reality show.&amp;quot; Then, when the interview was over, he went back to speaking about Obama. He said that people took the Halftime in America commercial to mean that he was supportive of the president politically; but they were mistaken. The president had awarded him the Medal of the Arts, but he&amp;#039;d not attended the ceremony, he said, and then he got down to what he objected to most: &amp;quot;Can you imagine being him, surrounded by people all the time? I&amp;#039;d hate it. But he seems to like it. He seems to like what I&amp;#039;d hate, all the trappings of power. He said that if he failed in his first term he wouldn&amp;#039;t seek a second. Well, here he is \u2014 unemployment&amp;#039;s still up around 8 percent \u2014 and he&amp;#039;s doing anything he possibly can to keep power. There&amp;#039;s no way he&amp;#039;s going to give it up.&amp;quot; I didn&amp;#039;t wind up using the Obama quotes in my profile, not because they offended my political sensibilities, but because they made him sound like a type of person \u2014 another cranky old guy, running down the president, and not always very clearly \u2014 when I wanted to write about what made Clint Eastwood singular, what made him unlike any other Hollywood star who has ever lived, as both an actor and an artist, back when he was in his prime, and, yes, even now. The October issue of Esquire is on newsstands now. Here&amp;#039;s a special preview...       Follow The Politics Blog on RSS and Twitter &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a15756/clint-eastwood-interview-1012/?click=pp>