As somebody may have already observed, all the great events and personalities of history reappear in one form or another, the first time as tragedy, the second as farce. Doubtless there were farcical aspects to "Diana's year," which I looked back on 12 months ago (Prospect, January 1998): the mass hysteria and peasant hagiography of Diana Week at the beginning of September 1997, and the bizarre excesses of some of the late princess's admirers. Most absurd of all were the attempts by feminists in particular, and the left in general, to make a heroine out of Lady Diana Spencer and to connect her death with the Labour landslide four months earlier-as in David Edgar's claim that the floral tributes of September echoed the demand of the British people in May "that the brute, metallic logic of the market be constrained by a sense of moral responsibility." Still, even when it produces such ludicrous effusions, any violent death must be a tragedy.
No such reservations are necessary about "Monica's year," which has been farce of the finest kind. As Evelyn Waugh said of the abdication crisis: "There can seldom have been an event that has caused so much general delight and so little pain." Even the protagonists, who might not have agreed with that in August, could look back by November with a satisfaction unimaginable three months earlier.
The end of the year found President Clinton riding high in the opinion polls, having routed his foes in the November mid-term elections which had been advertised as his nemesis. Hillary Clinton was basking in still warmer public approval, glorified ? la Diana on the cover of Vogue, and seriously spoken of as a future Justice of the Supreme Court, or possibly, president. And even "that woman, Miss Lewinsky," whose life and career had once seemed ruined, made her own nourishing connection with the Diana myth by taking on Andrew Morton as her biographer.
So remarkable were these recoveries of fortune that it is now difficult to recapture the fevered atmosphere of last August and September. In Diana Week, level-headed people had spoken as though the monarchy itself was threatened; in the weeks after Clinton's television confession that he had had a "not appropriate" relationship with that woman-seven months after he had publicly denied having sexual relations with her-it was widely held that he would soon depart.
One columnist after another said that his presidency was finished. Hundreds of US newspapers insisted that he should resign; our own Sunday Times and Economist demanded that he should go, echoing the New York Times: "A president without public respect or congressional support cannot last." (In September there were, in fact, perfectly sane people prepared to bet large sums that Clinton would no longer be US President by the end of the year. The result is that New Year's Day will find some of us substantially richer.)
If this year left Clinton in office, it nevertheless raised questions about the way we live now, how we see ourselves, and how we feel about the private lives of public men. More interesting than anything Bill and Monica did in the Oval Office was the Rezeptionsgeschichte: how the affair was interpreted, who took which side, and what this said about the interpreters.
As the year ended, similar questions were raised in Britain by a series of minor sex scandals, as though the Blair government has to keep up with the Clinton administration in this as in every other way. One cabinet minister kept his place when he was forced by a gutter newspaper to acknowledge his homosexuality; another had to resign after he tried to make new friends on Clapham Common; and a third refused to discuss his private life despite some determined "outings."
It would be silly to seek some cosmic significance in the fact that, not for the first time, men in high places have been slaking their carnal appetites, and then lying about it. But there is a truth lurking here. A year ago, I suggested that Diana's year had illustrated a great theme of the age: the right has won politically, but the left has won culturally. Looking back, 1998 illustrates something else: the great twin political problems of the age are the brutality of the right, and the dishonesty of the left.
This brutality has been displayed for several years by Clinton's enemies, who have harried him with a ferocity no other US president this century has endured. Even those of us who don't like the man are startled by the sheer hatred he inspires on the right. Admittedly, he is also hated by some on the left, such as Christopher Hitchens, who detests this "fawning jerk" and his "sickly ingratiation." And you don't have to be a religious reactionary or a conservative fanatic-or even to be especially shocked by Clinton's private conduct-to find something deeply repellent about the man's fake religiosity and therapy babble.
Forgive him his trespasses-but not the way he begs forgiveness: "I've done my best to be your friend, but I also let you down, and I let my family down and let this country down. But I'm trying to make it right. I'm determined to redeem the trust of the people who were with me in 1991 when nobody but my mother and my wife thought I had a chance of being elected... I hope this will be a time of reconciliation and healing, and I hope that millions of families all over America are growing stronger because of this... And I have no one to blame but myself for my self-inflicted wounds. But that is what America is about."
Something else which it will be difficult to explain to posterity is that, at the end of the millennium, the mightiest power on earth-in many ways the most advanced civilisation in history-could be led by a man capable of addressing his fellow citizens like this.
The president's own cringing prattle was dishonest enough, and so was the exaggeration of his defenders. Not content with accusing the right of brutal partisanship (which was true enough), they talked of a coup d'?tat. Well before the publication of the Starr report, Hillary Clinton had claimed that her husband was the target of a "vast right-wing conspiracy." That phrase was absurd. Anyone can see that there was no conspiracy in any coordinated sense, merely disparate groups which had developed an almost pathological hatred of Clinton. What seems so odd about this hatred is that politically the right has won.
Clinton may demonstrate, in a peculiarly bleak way, the cultural victory of the left (his confessional speeches were shot through with 1960s mawkishness: "I feel your pain, please share mine"). But his record as chief executive underlines the ascendancy of the right. For the most part his legacy would have done justice to a none-too-liberal Republican. "Triangulation" is an elegant name for beating your political opponents by stealing and then prettifying their policies, otherwise known as the Third Way. Intelligent British Tories have quietly recognised that Blair's New Labour is Thatcher's greatest triumph; it is curious that American conservatives cannot take something of the same sardonic satisfaction in Clinton.
Instead they treat him as if he were a mixture of Pol Pot and Caligula. Kenneth Starr achieved the difficult feat of making some of us feel sorry for the president-but then American conservatives had already achieved the more difficult feat of finding in Starr an even unworthier champion than liberals had found in Clinton. So much as looking at the Starr report in the cold light of winter is painful: the document is pornographic (if that word has any meaning), and it is humbug to say that it was necessary to demonstrate what the New York Times acknowledges is the president's "habitual mendacity." We knew that, anyway. Starr could have made his point unequivocally without a wealth of salacious detail, and without telling us things about Bill and Monica which, frankly, we don't need to know about anyone.
Comically enough, while Hillary Clinton echoed McCarthy's own paranoid language about vast conspiracies, others used the well-worn charge of McCarthyism to defend Clinton. In the London newspapers on the Saturday and Sunday after the publication of the Starr report, there were at least five allusions by columnists to "witch-hunts," "Salem," The Crucible and "sexual McCarthyism." That was the title which, before the end of the year, the egregious Alan Dershowitz had given to his book on the case.
All that was needed was Arthur Miller himself and, sure enough, he stepped forward in the New York Times to remind us that "witch-hunts are always spooked by women's horrifying sexuality," and that he had thought again of Salem "when Congress went pawing through Starr's fiercely exact report on the president's intimate meetings with Lewinsky. I guess nothing changes much"-including the addle-pated tendentiousness of Miller himself, one might say.
When The Crucible was first performed, the critic Eric Bentley pointed out that its parable was highly misleading: in the 17th century, witches didn't exist; in the 20th century, communists did. No more is Clinton's private misconduct imaginary, or his mendacity. The authentic flavour of the McCarthy era may be the way that the Clintonians have reacted, rather as some liberals did, mutatis mutandis, 45 years ago, when they disingenuously refused to admit that communists did exist. And the zealotry of Clinton's enemies has backfired, just as McCarthy's demagogy did.
We know that Clinton is a lecher and a liar, and a man who has given new meaning to casuistry, "the truthful well-weighed answer that tells the blacker lie," or baroque linguistic evasion. If nothing else, the year deserves to be remembered for the glorious Clintonism: "It depends on what the meaning of 'is' is." (One correspondent of a London newspaper pointed out that this sentence sums up a large part of 20th-century philosophical enquiry, notably the work of Heidegger and his successors.)
And so Clinton's own evasions and prevarications set the tone for his defenders. They couldn't easily come to terms with the degree to which he had behaved badly, to his family, friends and colleagues-the last, maybe, most of all. Hillary Clinton must be more inured than anyone else to her husband's behaviour; it is hard to believe that anything he does, or any lies he tells about it, shock her any longer. It is true that he has humiliated her twice over, as a wife and as a feminist. But the way he humiliated his political allies was, if anything, worse.
Writing with octogenarian sprightliness in the Dublin Sunday Independent, Conor Cruise O'Brien used a phrase from Irish politics to describe the president's treatment of those allies. When a political leader takes a line, as Clinton did when he denied having had sexual relations with that woman, when he expects his colleague to toe the same line, and when he subsequently and abruptly changes it, then those colleagues are "left with their arses hanging out of the window," not a posture which Madeleine Albright or Donna Shalala can find very dignified.
Not that Clinton has ever done anything but make life difficult for his friends, colleagues and admirers. From the beginning, his career in national politics was dogged with "bimbo eruptions." Those eruptions have placed Clintonians in a quandary; it is this which has led to such a gaudy display of the dishonesty of the left.
as the debate unfurled it became clear that the defences of Clinton came at best in the category known in logic as ignoratio elenchi: refuting the proposition not advanced, true but irrelevant. Alternatively, there were arguments which could be used honourably by anyone except those using them.
There has always been a respectable-or at least a plausible-defence of the private irregularities of public men. At the Senate hearings for the late John Tower it was said that his liking for a drink and for female companionship disqualified him from high office. As an Englishman, I couldn't help thinking back over our own history, and its two great wars this century. During the first, David Lloyd George was, as AJP Taylor observed, "the first prime minister since the Duke of Grafton to live openly with his mistress." During the second, Winston Churchill was prime minister with what many doctors would now consider a functional alcoholic's all-day intake of whisky and champagne. The two men did, after all, win their wars, in Churchill's case against that well-known teetotal vegetarian, Adolf Hitler. Would it have been better if their private predilections had disqualified them from public office?
By contrast with those two, William E Gladstone was perhaps the most devout and ascetic Christian ever to be prime minister, a man who spent most of every Sunday in church and throve on theological controversy; who was undoubtedly a virgin on his wedding day and a faithful husband for more than 60 years (despite his enthusiasm for meeting ladies of the night in the streets of London). And yet he was free from the puritanism of his time, or from the neo-puritanism of today. He once said that he had known 11 other prime ministers, seven of whom to his knowledge had been adulterers; and this was not said to suggest that those men had been unfit to hold office.
As Roy Jenkins puts it: "Gladstone could often be self-righteous and sometimes priggish, but he was not a hypocrite." The great political drama of 1890-91 was the fall of Charles Stewart Parnell, after the leader of the Irish national party was cited as the lover of Katherine O'Shea when her husband sued for divorce. It was a disastrous business for the cause of Irish Home Rule, and in some ways Gladstone handled it clumsily. But what he said about Parnell in private was fascinating. "What, because a man is called leader of a party, does that constitute him a censor and a judge of faith and morals? I will not accept it. It would make life intolerable."
Those are admirable words, and might do as a defence of Clinton-from anyone, that is, except those who had bayed for Clarence Thomas's blood. The trouble is that those who wanted to make that defence were hoist on their previous record, and the censoriousness or puritanism which now goes under the heading of political correctness or radical feminism. We have been reminded that President Kennedy was an even more compulsive philanderer than Clinton-as though that absolved Clinton. Those who bring Kennedy into the debate forget that between two presidential inaugurations, in 1961 and 1993, something had happened. It was called the women's movement, which demanded (among other things) that there should be an equality of respect in sexual relations, and that men should not treat women as physical playthings.
That movement was very vocal when Clarence Thomas was nominated to the Supreme Court by President George Bush. His foes produced Anita Hill, who accused him of sexual harassment, although she didn't claim that it involved any sexual favours. There were no liberals then to say that "it's just sex" (and in any case, it wasn't; if Anita was to be believed, it was no more than ribald conversation).
Well before Monica Lewinsky appeared on the public stage, Paula Jones had made her accusations against the president. A detached observer might have thought that there were obvious similarities between the cases of Clarence and Anita and Bill and Paula: in both cases, a powerful man and a vulnerable young woman. This presented a logical problem for Clinton's partisans who had unanimously wanted to do Thomas down; in the way they dealt with the problem they vied for a Pulitzer prize in speciousness.
First, Evan Thomas of Newsweek dismissed Paula Jones as "some sleazy woman with big hair coming out of the trailer parks." (In England we have a word for that; we call it "snobbish." Even the witty Maureen Dowd of the New York Times damned Monica with the words, "Live by big hair, die by big hair.") Then came Philip Weiss of the New York Observer: Anita Hill is "a very private and proper person, maybe repressed. She doesn't seem comfortable with sexuality." Paula Jones, on the other hand, "is plainly someone who feels comfortable in the sexual arena." So there you have it, the bien pensant liberal view of the matter-Anita Hill was a delicate flower and a bashful maiden; Paula Jones asked for it.
Highest marks of all went to Richard Cohen of the Washington Post, addressing "the question which conservatives ask liberals": why is Anita Hill a heroine of the women's movement and Paula Jones not? His answer lies in the difference not between the two women but between the two men: "Bill Clinton is not, like Justice Thomas, a conservative ideologue." This is a novel and ingenious legal avenue. One envisages Cohen as defence counsel for Serb terrorists arraigned before a war crimes tribunal: "Although the defendants may have engaged in gang rape and mass murder, I would put it to the court in extenuation that none is a conservative ideologue."
Some Clintonians were blunter still. One columnist said that Lewinsky was the predator in the affair, which was arguably true, but a bitter truth for feminists to acknowledge. And the eccentric Tory MP Alan Clark (an unlikely Clintonian, except for some enthusiasms in common) went one better, telling us with feeling that "most girls of 19 are randy little minxes, giving small thought that the object of their desire might be married to someone else."
If Gore Vidal doesn't lust after young minxes, he explains in his languid way that: "Boys are meant to squirt as often as possible with as many different partners as possible. Girls are designed to take nine months to lay an egg." He also suspects "that Clinton doesn't much care for Warm Mature Relationships with Warm Caring Women. Hence an addiction to the impersonal blow job." Vidal claims to be an admirer of the president and a friend of the first lady; I like to think of Hillary sitting next to Vidal, nodding gravely while he says that.
And it wasn't just the guys. Some self-proclaimed feminists remained astonishingly eager to defend Clinton and his long-suffering wife. Susan Faludi thought that "the critical split is the one between girls and grown-ups." Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky are "young and na?ve," mere "girls," whose only power is through "having a sulk 'n' sob in front of the adults." By contrast, Hillary is an adult, who may be hurt but "isn't sharing it with every daddy figure on television." She knows that feminism is really "about seeing what happened to you in proportion, and about knowing when the public good outweighs your having a temper tantrum over a personal offence." Even these Gals for Bill were outdone by the Washington journalist who proudly said she would give the president a blow job to thank him for what he had done for women-not quite the spirit of Mary Wollstonecraft or Emily Pankhurst.
It is easy enough to see the false position of Clinton's soi-disant feminist defenders. They regard him as a lesser evil, a man who has favoured women's causes, notably abortion, which has become an obsession of the American right. Clinton's qualified support for "freedom of choice" is indeed one of the few areas where he can still claim to be on the liberal side. And so, with Clinton under attack from the religious right, some women have acted on the principle that "my enemy's enemy is my friend," or unconsciously echoed Roosevelt's pithy phrase: "He may be a son-of-a-bitch but he's our son-of-a-bitch."
But hold on. "My enemy's enemy" can be a good rule in diplomacy, and an essential one in wartime. Stalin was an appalling mass murderer, but no one doubts that the British were right to make an alliance with him in June 1941; as Churchill said in an even nicer phrase: "If Hitler had invaded Hell I would make at least a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons."
And yet "my enemy's enemy" is a dangerous rule in politics, not to say a disastrous one in intellectual or moral debate, as some other feminists have recognised. The Wall Street Journal has been notably venomous in its pursuit of Clinton and was especially pleased to find Martha Ackermann, a feminist academic, to denounce the president as a man whom all women should condemn. Some of what she said was a little overheated, but her central point was unassailable: forget the lies or the videotape, look at the sex.
Never mind his consequent perjury, subornation or obstruction of justice. Clinton's sexual conduct in itself would have assured his dismissal if he had been working for many US corporations, and particularly if he had been a senior officer in the armed forces of which he is commander-in-chief. Colonels or generals who enjoy Lewinskyian favours from 21-year-old female corporals in barracks are dismissed, and that is that. It is no defence whatever to say that it was adult, consensual or private, or even that the corporal was set up and betrayed by a false friend.
One or two British feminists recognised this also. Joan Smith of the Independent on Sunday has insisted that the sisters' double standard over Clinton is grossly dishonest. A prime case was the National Organisation for Women, which had lobbied the Senate to block the nomination of Thomas, a conservative Republican, to the Supreme Court, but which showed the greatest reluctance to condemn Clinton ("our son-of-a-bitch").
An almost weirder example of this cognitive dissonance came just before the mid-term elections from a woman, interviewed on Channel 4 News, who ran her own business in southern California. She didn't revere Clinton, but thought he should stay in office, and said she would vote for the Democrats. By the way, the interviewer asked, what would happen to a man working for her who had dallied on the premises as Bill had with Monica? "Oh, he'd be fired, of course."
The consequence of this is plain enough, as the more clear-sighted feminists have seen. After the voters had told Clinton in November that he could get away with it, one of his right-wing enemies consoled himself by writing that the existing sexual harassment law was now mortally wounded.
This might not be such a bad thing. Repellent as Clinton is, a victory for his most envenomed enemies would not have been pretty. At the time when he seemed most imperilled, one of his journalistic enemies said with satisfaction that he could not survive because he was opposed by the two most powerful forces in American life: militant feminism and the religious right. If those two have suffered a setback, many of us won't weep.
Something went wrong with radical feminism when, in its righteousness, it lost sight of justice and objectivity, insisting that there was no difference between "date rape" and savage rape at knife point, or between quid pro quo harassment-sexual favours in return for professional advancement-and foolish banter, telling a colleague her dress is nice or repeating some dialogue from the previous night's Seinfeld (foolish banter for which US men can be and are sacked).
By exempting Clinton from the latest rules of sexual correctness, the left failed to see that it was weakening its own position on sexual harassment, and even reinforcing the political hegemony of the right. In Britain, the Blair junta has made much of its purity and clean hands-too much, it seems, at the end of the year. Most of us are pleased that Nick Brown kept his Cabinet job, even that Peter Mandelson has continued to keep himself to himself. The personal is political-sometimes-but the right is wrong to peep behind every bedroom door (as well as ill-advised to do so, given the private lives of Republican and Tory politicians). But if we are spared a sexual reign of terror from the right, spare us also another such display of gross double standards and dishonesty from the left as we saw in Monica's year.
