It’s possible to speculate about whether the First Lady has become such a mistress of mendacity by a sort of osmosis from her husband, and the many levels of “denial” he has imposed upon her, or whether she had the same original talent that he did. (Some objective biographers describe her early shock and alarm at Arkansas Tammany practices, at the discovery of what was considered legal.) Whatever may be the case here, there’s no doubt that her single-mindedness, combined with a natural authoritarian self-discipline, have become political phenomena in themselves. Mrs. Clinton may now find it opportune to present herself as a survivor or even a victim, but the plain facts remain that:
The hiring of the squalid and unscrupulous Dick Morris, as adviser both at state and national level, was her idea. Mr. Morris has boasted of being a procurer for her husband as part of his package of political skills.
The hiring of private detectives for the investigation and defamation of inconvenient women was also her idea.
The dubious use of a powerful law firm as an engine of political patronage was principally her scheme.
The firing of non-client White House staff, the amassing of files on political opponents, and the magical vanishing and reappearance of subpoenaed documents, all took place in her wing of the White House, and on her apparent instructions.
A check for $50,000, written by a donor with intimate ties to the Chinese military-industrial complex, was hand-delivered to her chief of staff in the White House.
On a notable occasion, she urged investigative journalists to pursue the rumor that President George Bush had kept a mistress on his payroll.
She allowed the exploitation of her daughter in the crudest and most painful photo-ops in living memory.
She regarded the allegation of a sexual arrangement with Monica Lewinsky as proof positive of “a vast right-wing conspiracy.”
She further accused those who pursued that allegation of harboring a prejudice against people from Arkansas, while hailing herself from Illinois, and readying a campaign to represent New York.
On a visit to New Zealand, she claimed to have been named for Sir Edmund Hillary’s ascent of Everest; a triumph that occurred some years after her birth and christening. (I insert this true story partly for comic relief, as showing an especially fantastic sense of self-reinvention as well as a desperate, mysterious willingness to pander for the Kiwi vote.)
A whole chapter could be written under any of these separate headings. Mrs. Clinton, of course, is to be pitied in a way that her husband cannot be. Desperately keen to run him for the nomination in 1988 after the implosion of Gary Hart, she had to debase herself by listening to Betsey Wright’s recitation of the roster of outraged women who made that impossible. But this revelation never inhibited her from blaming the female victims; from announcing for example that she would “crucify” Gennifer Flowers, or from helping her spouse to lie his way through that difficulty, and through all the subsequent ones, up to and including believable accusations of rape and molestation.
Her role model, according to herself, is that of Eleanor Roosevelt. She has even claimed, during her remarkably frank admissions of traffic with enablers and facilitators and other modern voodoo-artists, to have “channeled” the former First Lady. Mrs. Roosevelt, who also suffered “pain in her marriage,” was constantly urging her husband to be more brave about civil rights, about the threat of fascism, about the plight of the dispossessed. She often shamed him into using some of his credit, with Congress and public opinion, for unpopular causes. There is not one shard of evidence that Mrs. Clinton has ever done any such thing. To the contrary: Dick Morris was her preferred consigliere, and according to him, in 1995 she said:
Our liberal friends are just going to understand that we have to go for welfare reform—for eliminating the welfare entitlement. They are just going to have to get used to it. I’m not going to listen to them or be sympathetic to them.
At every stage of the fund-raising bonanzas and the stone-walling of special investigators, Mrs. Clinton was at the forefront of the action and found to be urging a more ruthless style. Her reward was to hear Dick Morris say, when he had been fired, that “Bill loves Bill, and Hillary loves Bill, and so that gives them something in common.” A sadder dysfunctional bonding would be hard to find: the most bitter and reproachful element being the open and cynical use, in the lying campaign against Jones, Lewinsky, and the other “Jane Does,” of Mrs. Clinton’s only worthwhile achievement in the shape of her daughter, Chelsea. A speck of pity, here, perhaps.
It comes down, though, to the exploitation of mammalian sentiments by reptilian people. When caught making a gigantic profit on cattle-future trades in which she was “carried” by clients of her husband, Mrs. Clinton abandoned the pose of the strong businesswoman perusing the stock pages of the Wall Street Journal, and simperingly claimed that her hormones were all out of whack because she was pregnant with Chelsea. How could she be expected to remember details? When the 1996 election looked to be a bit more close-fought than it turned out to be, she artfully told my friend Walter Isaacson, editor of Time magazine, that she and “Bill” were “talking” (that word again) about having or adopting a new baby. We are “talking about it more now,” she breathed. “I must say we’re hoping to have another child.” Duly reproduced—if you allow the expression—in print, the revelation pointed up the difference in child-bearing or even child-adopting age between her husband and the creaking Senator Bob Dole, later to be a talking, if not exactly walking, advertisement for the wonder-working properties of Viagra. None of the supposed “attack dogs” of the self-regarding New York press has yet asked what happened to that unborn or unconceived or unadopted child. Evidently, it took a different kind of village.
In the same way, a woman whose main claim to sympathy is the supposed violation of her intimate privacy, and that of her notorious husband, made an on-the-record incitement to journalists in 1992, telling my Vanity Fair colleague Gail Sheehy: “I don’t understand why nothing’s ever been said about a George Bush girlfriend. I understand he has a Jennifer, too.” Especially outrageous was the “too,” in view of the fact that she had hysterically denied that Clinton had a “Jennifer” at all. Or perhaps it all depends on what the spelling of “Gennifer” is. (For the record, I myself investigated and ventilated the Jennifer Fitzgerald story in 1988: it seemed at least plausible that there had been an affair but not that Ms. Fitzgerald had (a.) been awarded her government job in return for sexual favors, or (b.) been denounced as either a nut or a slut by her former lover when embarrassed, or (c.) been asked to perform sexual acts while Bush was on the telephone in the Oval Office, or (d.) been overheard by a foreign embassy’s electronic eavesdroppers while in the course of a phone-sex session linking the White House and the Watergate building, or (e.) been farmed out to a job in the Pentagon or the United Nations, or (f.) been bitten on the mouth, or (g.) been raped. If there was an affair, it was strictly consensual. And even Bushes are allowed some privacy, and can be expected to lie about sex.) Mrs. Clinton went on to help hire sordid private dicks like Terry Lenzner and Jack Palladino; a banana-republic auxiliary police for a White House who lied and lied and lied—not just about the sex, but about the women.
It’s possible to feel a certain sympathy for the poor old American Right when confronted with this most protean and professional antagonist. They wish—how they wish—to convict her as the secular humanist, feminist, subversive schoolmarm they need her to be. And she goes on evading their net. Her main crimes have been the ones alleged by Jerry Brown and Ralph Nader in 1992—the transmutation of public office into private interest and vice versa, via a nexus of shady property deals and Savings and Loans. (Not a nexus that Reagan fans show any special willingness to unravel.) She is a dogged attender at church and a frequent waffler at Prayer Breakfasts and similar spectacles. She is for sexual abstinence, law and order, and the war on drugs. She stands by her man. She is for a woman’s right to “choose,” but then so are most Republican ladi
es these days. She used to be a Goldwater girl and a preachy miss, and it shows. She once assured Larry King that “there is no Left in the Clinton White House.”
In 1992, the GOP’s “opposition research” people thought they had her. It emerged that twenty years before, she had worked as a summer intern from Yale Law School in the deep-Red law firm of Bob Treuhaft, husband of Jessica Mitford. This firm had long handled all the radical labor cases in the Bay Area—leading Jessica or “Decca” to discover the scandal of the American funeral industry and its annexation of the death benefit, and to write the imperishable exposé The American Way of Death. In 1972, the same firm was heavily engaged in providing legal defense to the Black Panther Party, which for all its crimes and depredations was in physical danger from the Oakland police department.
Here was an actual and potential “gotcha.” But by the time the Bush-Quayle team found it out, their private polls showed that American voters recoiled in principle from any attacks on the wife of candidate Clinton. So the material was reluctantly laid aside, to resurface every now and then in books and pamphlets written by rancorous conservatives who can’t believe, even today, that Mr. and Mrs. Clinton escaped the nemesis of the law. I can scarcely believe it either but I can clear up a point or two.
Decca Mitford was a dear friend of mine; an honorable and brave ex-Communist, and a foe of all bores and all bigots. In the carrying tones of her class, she once described the experience of knowing the young Hillary Rodham.
A nice enough girl if a bit intense… married this young chap who later became the governor of Arkansas. We had a client on Death Row there, extradited from California. Turned out to be innocent, by the way, no thanks to Jerry Brown who let him be extradited. Anyway I thought I’d pop across to Little Rock and look up Miss Hillary. Got asked to tea on the strength of an old acquaintance, made my pitch for the poor defendant, got a flea in my ear. Situation all changed; big political prospects for the happy couple; not interested in reopening the case. Realism, I think she said. The real world. Perfectly ghastly if you ask me.
She went on to express herself forcefully about the corporate Clintons, and about the slimy speech that Bill had made at Nixon’s funeral.
Returning from California, and from seeing the splendid Ms. Mitford in the fall of 1994, I met Hillary Clinton one-on-one for the first and last time. Wondering what she’d say, I brought her the greetings of Decca and Bob. Even in a roomful of liberals—this was Sidney Blumenthal’s birthday party, on the eve of Newt Gingrich’s clean midterm sweep—she could not disown the connection fast enough. “Oh yes, I think I was there for a very short period.” She had put that behind her and moved on.
At whose expense is this irony, if it is indeed an irony at all? Partly at the expense of the Right, which clings to its necessary myth of a diabolic liberal who will stop at nothing. Yet surely more at the expense of the liberals, especially the liberals of New York, willing to immolate themselves once again for a woman who has proved over and over that she cares nothing for their cherished “causes” but will risk anything, say anything, pay any price, bear any burden, to get her family a big house and secure herself a high-profile job. She is owed this, after all, for everything she has suffered on our behalf. Where do we find such women? And how shall we be worthy? Passing through its decadent phase, American liberalism enters the moment of the purely amnesiac.
On the morning of their inauguration in January 1993, the Clintons were observed standing on the steps of Blair House, official hospitality headquarters of L’Enfant’s grand and dignified federal city. “Fucking bitch,” the President-elect screamed at his newly-minted First Lady. “Stupid mother-fucker,” she riposted. We may never know what hideous story of “enabling” and betrayal lay behind this poisoning of their big day, but we can fix it in time as the one moment when both were totally candid in public, and both were utterly right on the facts. Those who would vote to prolong the presence of this partnership in public life are not doing so with the excuse of innocence or gullibility that might have obtained in 1992.
The figure of Mrs. Clinton was anticipated by Henry Adams in his tremendous novel Democracy, published as an anonymous satire on Washington corruption in 1880. Here we encounter Mrs. Lightfoot Lee, female manipulator extraordinaire:
In her own mind, however, she frowned on the idea of seeking for men. What she wished to see, she thought, was the clash of interests, the interests of forty millions of people and a whole continent, centering at Washington: guided, restrained, controlled, or unrestrained and uncontrollable, by men of ordinary mold; the tremendous forces of government, and the machinery of society, at work. What she wanted was POWER.
The capitals were Adams’s. Mrs. Lee in the end found the Senate a disappointment; in any case the condition of her making any headway was that she was a widow.
Afterword
“Then, Patrick, you do feel it too? You do feel… something? It would be so bleak if you felt nothing. That’s what scares women, you know.”
“I do know, and you needn’t be scared. I feel something all right.”
“Promise me you’ll always treat me as a person.”
“I promise.”
“Promises are so easily given.”
“I’ll fulfil this one. Let me show you.”
After a shaky start he was comfortably into the swing of it, having recognised he was on familiar ground after all. Experience had brought him to see that this kind of thing was nothing more than the levying of cock-tax, was reasonable and normal, in fact, even though some other parts of experience strongly suggested that what he had shelled out so far was only a down payment.
—Kingsley Amis, Difficulties With Girls
“I asked him why he doesn’t ask me any questions about myself, and… is this just about sex, or do you have some interest in getting to know me as a person?” The President laughed and said, according to Ms. Lewinsky, that “he cherishes the time he had with me.” She considered it “a little bit odd” for him to speak of cherishing their time together “when I felt like he didn’t really even know me yet.”
—Judge Kenneth Starr, Official Report of the Independent Counsel’s Investigation of the President (entry for January 21, 1996)
The abysmal finale of the Clinton folly was enacted, for every practical purpose, as if the President had a natural right to pass on his cock-tax costs to the consumer. At no point were any political or constitutional or even legal considerations permitted to “rise to the level,” in the canting phrase of the day, where they might disturb the orderly running and management of the consensus and the stock market. Most bizarre of all was the manner in which this priority appeared under its own name.
The United States Senate, before which the final hearing of the first impeachment of an elected president took place, is perhaps the world’s most deliberately conservative political body. Owing in part to Article V of the Constitution, it is impossible to amend the provision that grants two senators to each state of the union, regardless of population. Thus—in an arrangement aptly described by Daniel Lazare as one of “rotten boroughs”—unpopulous white and rural states such as Montana and Wyoming have the same representation as do vast and all-American and ethnically diverse states like New York and California. (Lazare gives a ratio of twelve to one between most populated and least populated state in 1790; today the ratio would be sixty-seven to one—an imbalance about which opinion has not yet been tested by polling.)
Moreover, the Senate is bound by arcana, procedural and historical, which are designed to limit not just public pressure but even public understanding. How often was it written, in the opening stages of the impeachment trial, that only one senator (and he the somewhat “unpredictable” veteran member from West Virginia, Robert Byrd) even comprehended the rule book. Like the Schleswig-Holstein question, or Bagehot’s evocation of the British monarchy, the United States Senate is supposed to be immune from rational scrutiny and unintelligible to the ordinary gaze.
; The decent conservative defense of such an institution would be, quite simply, that this evident flummery also furnishes a rampart against sudden gusts of demotic emotion. Such was certainly the intent of the Framers. So it was most fascinating, in the early weeks of the century’s closing year, to witness the open collusion between constitutional obscurantism and the hucksterism of the polls; between antique ritual and shrewdly calculated advice on short-term media advantage; between, to go back to my beginning, the elitist style and the populist style. The clear winners in this cynical charade were the Clintonoid Democrats, who (as well as being hardened to switching and shifting between elitism and populism) could supply the most cobwebbed rules-monger on one hand—the aforementioned Senator Byrd—and the most sinuous arguments of the short-term general will on the other. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, as so often, provided the fluid pivot and axis on which such a strategy could be made to turn, according to need, or according to the needs of New York’s lumpen intellectuals.
During the Reagan era, the White House managers more than once managed to attain to the very nirvana of modern elitist populism—namely, they got a good press for getting a good press. I don’t remember seeing the trick pulled again until the late decadence of the Clinton era, when journalists considered it their job to ridicule the very idea of a Senate trial, and when certain of the more savvy senators understood what was needful to attract a favorable story. (Reading Sports Illustrated on the floor of the Senate, with his back artfully turned to the press gallery, was the tactic successfully adopted by Democratic Senator Herbert Kohl of Wisconsin.) More distressing still was the open declaration that evidence would make, or could make, no difference. Since impeachment was not liked by the electorate, in either its actual or virtual forms, and not desired by Wall Street, and since conviction could only result in removal from office, it followed that no conviction was possible. From this reverse reasoning, the exclusion of witnesses was but a short step. As Hilaire Belloc put it: “The stocks were sold. The press was squared. The middle class was quite prepared.”