Book: The Clinton Wars
Author: Sidney Blumenthal
Price: Viking, ?25
Within a week of moving to Washington in April 1993, I noticed a car sporting a bumper sticker that read, "Don't blame me, I voted for Bush." This traditional gesture of political opposition usually shows up after a president has been in office for a year or so. When I saw that bumper sticker, Bill Clinton had been president for under four months. Allowing time for the bumper sticker's printing and distribution... well, you get the idea. From the first, Clinton's opponents refused to be constrained even by the appearance of fair play. They were intent on destroying him.
And he had a lot of opponents. There were the right-wing think tanks and right-wing publishers, financed by mysterious recluses like Richard Mellon Scaife; the semi-secret and powerful lawyers' groups like the Federalist Society; the clownish hatemongers of the radio waves, reckless with the truth and widely influential; the emerging gossips of the internet, unaccountable and seething with malice; the fundamentalist Christian movement; and establishment organs like the Wall Street Journal, prepared to sacrifice objectivity for political expediency. These different groups didn't see eye to eye on every policy question, but they were in constant communication with one another, and agreed on one big thing: Bill Clinton was fundamentally evil, his presidency illegitimate. What they wrought can best be understood as a sustained, concerted and ultimately successful coup against the legally constituted government of the US.
Although Sidney Blumenthal's massive The Clinton Wars does not directly present such a thesis, it provides plenty of supporting evidence. The book is a painstakingly detailed, over-long account of the Clinton presidency and the role Blumenthal, a senior adviser to Clinton, played in some of its more dramatic events. It is marred by too many lengthy divagations: a tough editor could probably have cut the book in half without doing irreparable damage to the whole. It might also be said-and of course has been said, repeatedly-that Blumenthal's loyalty to the Clintons is so thoroughgoing, so uncritical, so personal, that he lacks the necessary distance and objectivity to write a balanced account. Nevertheless, conceding all that, I find him to be a consistently reliable guide, and a source of much information not otherwise available. Despite its occasional excesses and flaws, this book is indispensable.
Lyndon Johnson used to tell of an east Texas man trailing in a race for county commissioner. His campaign manager suggests, "Say your opponent fucks pigs." Puzzled, the candidate asks, "But he doesn't, does he?" The campaign manager answers, "Maybe not, but can you see him up there denying it?"
This was the tack Clinton's opponents took. They knew that an endless barrage of accusations sullies the accused even when false. Some of the accusations aimed at Clinton were absurdly trivial; some just absurd. He had run drugs out of a small airstrip in Arkansas; he fired the people in the White House travel office so he could give their jobs to cronies; his wife had been discovered in a lesbian embrace in a White House bedroom; his aide Vince Foster-who committed suicide-had been murdered on presidential orders; he himself was regularly bundled in a carpet and carried out of the White House by the secret service to enjoy assignations at hotels around Washington.
Alongside these nonsensical charges, two broad areas of alleged misbehaviour seemed to occupy somewhat more plausible ground. One involved Clinton's rambunctious sexual activities, the other a failed Arkansas land deal from the 1980s, known as Whitewater, in which the Clintons had invested and lost $10,000.
The latter area presented the more respectable target of opportunity, although it ultimately produced nothing beyond convenient ingress to the former. Congressional Republicans began to agitate for the appointment of a special prosecutor. With very little supporting evidence, but with the assistance of their unelected allies and a press eager for scandal, they generated sufficient public clamour that the attorney general felt compelled to give way, appointing a moderate Republican named Robert Fiske. After conducting his investigation, Fiske issued a report exonerating the Clintons of all charges. In a pattern that was to repeat itself many times over the next six years, Clinton's opponents refused to accept Fiske's report. They had Fiske replaced with one of their own, the noxious Kenneth Starr, who soon proved he would stop at nothing in his determination to destroy Clinton's presidency.
Blumenthal is excellent in tracking the progress of Starr's ill-judged investigation and its dead ends, violations of procedural norms, refusal to accept irrefutable exculpatory evidence, illegal (and inaccurate) leaks to friendly journalists, and pursuit of increasingly remote areas of wrongdoing far beyond the scope of its mandate. Blumenthal wasn't merely a witness to the process; in due course he became a victim, a target of Starr's grand jury.
As we now know-and as even the special prosecutor's final report grudgingly acknowledges-Clinton was innocent of criminal conduct in the Whitewater matter. But as we also now know, when the investigation moved on to sexual matters, the president began lying through his teeth. This is material that should never have become public, and has no bearing on Clinton's conduct of his office, but it is now part of the record, an inexpungible blemish. Blumenthal claims to have been surprised when he learned the truth. Is this claim credible? The question goes to the heart of Blumenthal's general reliability, and of his now notorious feud with Christopher Hitchens. As a friend of both men-and one who was present during some of these events-I believe I can offer some conclusions, however tentative.
Those who worked with Clinton primarily on policy issues found him to be serious, well-prepared, disciplined. Blumenthal served the president in such a capacity, and was also a friend of the first lady. He was not, therefore, likely to be privy to the more raffish side of the president's life. Nor was he the only member of the administration who disbelieved Monica Lewinsky's story; many in the cabinet felt the same (as did my wife, an important economic adviser during the first term, towards whom Clinton was always personable but unfailingly correct).
But those who served the president personally, his handlers and schedulers and the like, observed a very different Bill Clinton, one whose behaviour was far less disciplined, whose deportment far less dignified; one whose reckless sense of entitlement could put the entire enterprise of his presidency-the first progressive presidency in a generation-at serious risk. I had become friendly with some of these people during this period and, based on what they confided to me, I had no difficulty believing Lewinsky's story when it became public.
But they would never have confided in Blumenthal. So, although I consider his credulity naive (and arguably self-willed), I do not question it, nor any other aspect of his account, which strikes me as generally conscientious and responsible. But the issue doesn't quite end there. Blumenthal reports that Clinton told him privately that Lewinsky was a stalker who had pressured him to have sex, and that he had rebuffed her. He goes on to report that he believed the president. And he says he never shared the substance of that conversation with anyone else. I accept all these claims. I saw Blumenthal myself several times during this period, and I don't recall hearing anything that contradicts the book's account. But it's also true that, even without directly adducing Clinton's private conversation, he did deny Lewinsky's story, denied it vehemently, and echoed newspaper reports describing her as an obsessed stalker. (He says as much in the book.) I would guess this must also be what Hitchens heard.
So the fact remains: if Clinton denied the relationship, he was in effect saying Lewinsky was either a liar or a deluded fantasist. And anyone who defended the president against her charges therefore became, however unwittingly, party to a dishonest, dishonourable campaign to discredit her. Can it be doubted that if Lewinsky had not preserved her semen-stained dress, she would have been portrayed as a demented erotomaniac?
Sex is not an impeachable offence. Lying about sex is not an impeachable offence. And in any event, US politicians have usually treated each others' sexual escapades-at least heterosexual, non-bestial, non-paedophile escapades-as off-limits; since so many have similar vulnerabilities, use of such ammunition invites a kind of mutually assured destruction. But the Starr office, with nothing to show for its $70m, six-year investigation, with so many promises unfulfilled, so many confident assertions unrealised, was no more inclined to let common sense stand in its way than fairness, justice, law, or tradition.
The most mysterious aspect of this melancholy story is the role of the press. Most reporters voted for Clinton, probably for Gore too. Yet coverage of Clinton's travails-of Whitewater, Lewinsky, but also those early pseudo-scandals-was astonishingly uncritical. Leaks from the special prosecutor's office were published unverified. Known ideologues were treated as reliable sources. Each discredited accusation had no impact on the way the next one was treated. In aggregate, press behaviour during those eight years amounted to disgraceful professional dereliction. Blumenthal is good on these matters: detailed and specific. Even more focused is Eric Alterman in his recent What Liberal Media?, covering the same ground from a different perspective. Alterman's book should be read in conjunction with Blumenthal's. No one has demonstrated either to be wrong in any important particular.
Impeachment, as we know, failed. That last opportunity to defeat Clinton before he left office ended as an ignominious debacle. But the same cabal that had pursued him from the day of his inauguration, and that tried, in defiance of the evidence and massive public disapproval, to impeach and convict him, remained in place. In the 2000 presidential election, with the assistance of a few Florida state officials, a compliant press, and a Republican majority on the supreme court, they managed to steal a presidential election. Their coup had finally succeeded.
