I shall not forget the telephone call I received at home, on the Sunday before the final vote (February 7) from a Democratic senator not known for his political caution. He was, he said, now minded to vote for conviction on the obstruction of justice point. He also said that he felt the House of Representatives should have impeached Clinton for abuse of power: the one count that did not involve the cock-tax fallout, and that would have raised evident matters of the public interest. I was encouraged by something in his tone, and then discouraged again. “They haven’t presented the case very well,” he offered, as if the Republicans had really been allowed to present their case at all. “And they seem so partisan…” As soon as the keyword of the moment had escaped his lips, I knew all I needed to know. I asked him whether it wouldn’t seem “partisan” if not a single Democrat voted to convict. I suggested that, if power had been abused and justice obstructed, as he thought, it might have been nice if more people on the Left had troubled to notice it. To overlook the matter, and to leave it to the conservatives to call attention to it, and then to speak of a right-wing conspiracy, appeared to me in the light of the grossest casuistry. (There was something triangular about it.) “Anyway,” I closed by saying, “now I know what you think, and you know I know, and if you end up voting with the bloc, then only I will know.” And then we ended—we really did end—with mutual expressions of esteem. He did his duty by the party on the following Friday.
The words “only I will know” had by then acquired a special “resonance,” as people tend to say in Washington, in my own head. On January 23, Clinton’s chief defense counsel, Mr. Charles Ruff, had told the Senate in rotund terms:
Let me be very clear about one proposition which has been a subtheme running through some of the comments of the [House] managers over the last many days. The White House, the President, the President’s agents, the President’s spokespersons, no one has ever trashed, threatened, maligned, or done anything else to Monica Lewinsky. No one. (My italics.)
No knowledgeable person witnessing that statement—and there were many such witnesses—could be unaware of its complete falsity. To take one example: James Warren, the redoubtable bureau chief of the Chicago Tribune, commented later on CNN:
I can tell you one thing, having listened to Mr. Ruff yesterday or the day before talk about the injustice done to the White House by reports that they were bad-mouthing her, and that they were calling her a stalker. That comment by Ruff was so palpably untrue. If I had a buck for every person at the White House who bad-mouthed her to me last January I could leave the set now and head off to Antigua.
This direct contradiction, on an apparently small matter, had momentous implications. One of Mr. Ruff’s deputy counsels, Ms. Cheryl Mills, had earlier instructed the Senate that in order to prove obstruction of justice it was necessary to show that a witness had been offered inducements and subjected to threats. This is actually untrue: it is sufficient to prove that a potential witness has been exposed to either sort of pressure. However, after Clinton had involved the White House, the Pentagon, the U.S. mission to the UN, and his soft-money chief whip Vernon Jordan in trying to find Ms. Lewinsky a job, the “inducement” business required no further demonstration. With the spreading of allegations about stalking and blackmail, one could hear the other shoe dropping. Lewinsky was being warned of what might happen to her if she did not stay perjured. The House managers in the trial had become aware of this fact, and had made a good deal of it in the trial. There was thus a salient difference, on an important point of evidence.
At this point, I became the hostage of a piece of information that I possessed. Returning to Washington from the University of California, where I had been teaching the previous spring, I had gone with my wife for a “catch-up” lunch with our old friend Sidney Blumenthal. Filling us in on what we had missed by being out of town when the scandal broke, he said that what people didn’t understand, and needed to know, was the following: Monica Lewinsky had been threatening the president. Sidney had firsthand knowledge of the truth of this story (which I later discovered he also related, along with its original Presidential authorship, to the grand jury). Perhaps to spare my feelings or to avoid any too-obvious insult to my intelligence or our friendship, he did not include Clinton’s portrayal of himself as the prisoner Rubashov in Darkness at Noon. But otherwise, his account of the Chief Magistrate’s sufferings was as it later appeared in the Starr Report.
At the time, I remember thinking—but not saying—that the story seemed axiomatically untrue. Even if Ms. Lewinsky had stalking and blackmailing tendencies, it remains the case that a president cannot be interrupted—except conceivably by his wife—in his “own” Oval Office. Apart from anything else, the suggestion also sat ill with Clinton’s repeated claim, sometimes when under oath, that he and Ms. Lewinsky had never been alone together. Also at the time, I was more struck by the tone Sidney adopted in speaking about Kathleen Willey, whose allegations of a direct sexual lunge by Clinton had been aired on the program 60 Minutes the previous weekend. “Her poll numbers look good now,” he said rather coldly, “but you watch. They’ll be down by the end of the week.” As indeed they were. The White House, which when subpoenaed in the Jones case had been unable to locate them, rapidly unearthed all of Ms. Willey’s private notes to Clinton and made them public in one day.*
The “stalker” story had appeared extensively in print by then, immediately following the president’s false claim to Sidney (a claim which he later, in his Senate testimony, truthfully described as a lie). I believe that clippings to this effect were in a folder of material that he brought along to give me, and which I no longer possess. I also believe that at least two other senior White House aides were involved in spreading the smear against a defenseless and vulnerable young woman, who was not known at the time to possess any “forensic” evidence. One may imagine what would have been said about her, and done to her, if her garments had not once been flecked with DNA. Again at the time, the worst thing about the allegation was that Sidney seemed to believe it. It did not, for some months, acquire the significance that it assumed at trial.
In different formats and forums, including once in print, I passed the story along as an instance of what people have to believe, and how they have to think and speak, if they work for Clinton. I was readying another column on the subject when I was contacted by the chief investigative counsel of the House Judiciary Committee, on the Friday before the last day of Clinton’s trial, and asked if I would put my name to it again. Had I decided not to cooperate (and on the assumption that no attempt to compel my testimony would have been made), then only I need have known. The door marked “insider” would have shut noiselessly behind me. My decision, to carry on saying what I knew to be true, was in one way very easy. Having made it plain that I would not testify against anyone but Clinton, and only in his Senate trial (an option I would have forfeited by any delaying tactics), and having understood that I had lodged this point with my interlocutors, I signed an affidavit confirming my authorship of the story, and the President’s authorship of a vulgar and menacing slander. The consequences in my own life have made a literal truth out of what I had once written only metaphorically: Clintonism poisons everything it touches.
I had not known, when I met Sidney Blumenthal that day, that Kathleen Willey had already begun to experience harassment at her home, and that on the Monday after our lunch, she would receive a call from private investigator Jarrett Stern, who had sickened of his work. He warned her to be careful. It hasn’t even crossed my mind, at any time since, that Sidney would have or could have had anything to do with any sleazy tactics, or even possess any knowledge of them. But I do have to say that I didn’t like the tone he had acquired since we last met, and that in my memory it came to symbolize a certain mens rea in the Clinton White House.
There’s been a certain amount made of the subject of journalistic etiquette in these matters. Suppose, then, that I had lunched with some George Bush flack in 198
6, who had apologized for being late because the vice president had been delayed by the prolixity of Oliver North. The information would have been trivial at the time. But then suppose that I saw the same George Bush raise his hand a year later, to swear that he had never even met Oliver North. I would then be in possession of evidence. And it would be too easy (as a matter of fact, it already is much too easy) for any administration to make journalists into accomplices by telling them things, often unasked for, and then holding them to the privileges of confidentiality. Had such an occasion arisen in 1986 or 1987, I would certainly have made public what I knew. (I would have told Sidney, among others.) The pact which a journalist makes is, finally, with the public. I did not move to Washington in order to keep quiet and, as a matter of fact, nobody has yet asked me to do so. Nor am I usually given inadvertent glimpses of obstruction of justice, even by the sincerest apologists.
There’s a simple proof of what I mean here. The House Committee staff never asked me about Kathleen Willey. I voluntarily cited her only as part of the material of the conversation, and included the mention of her in the final affidavit because I had later come to believe that she was the victim of an injustice. Not one reporter or commentator dwelt on this for more than an instant: I suppose because it involved no conflict of evidence between Sidney Blumenthal and myself, and thus it didn’t help the “story” about fratricide at Washington dinner tables. But I knew or suspected by then that Clinton would “walk,” as they say, and I wanted to reproach those who had voted for his acquittal in the hope of a quick disposal of all charges about his exploitation of women and his use of the soft-money world to cover it up. They did not deserve to be able to say that they had not been told in time. (I made the same point, to no effect, in a Washington Post column published amid a pelting calumny on February 9, 1999.) By then, too, I knew about Juanita Broaddrick, and a few other things.
Hannah Arendt once wrote that the great success of Stalinism among the intellectuals could be attributed to one annihilating tactic. Stalinism replaced all debate about the merit of an argument, or a position, or even a person, with an inquiry about motive. I can attest, in a minor key, to the effect of this tactic in smaller matters. It was instantly said of me that I did what I did in order to promote this very book—still then uncompleted. Other allegations against me failed to rise to this elevated level. The truth or otherwise of what I had said was not disputed so much as ignored. When the finger points at the moon, the Chinese say, the idiot looks at the finger. As a much-scrutinized digit, I can attest to the effect of that, too.
The acquittal of Clinton, and the forgiving by implication of his abuses of public power and private resources, has placed future crooked presidents in a strong position. They will no longer be troubled by the independent counsel statute. They will, if they are fortunate, be able to employ “the popularity defense” that was rehearsed by Ronald Reagan and brought to a dull polish by Clinton. They will be able to resort to “the privacy defense” also, especially if they are inventive enough to include, among their abuses, the abuse of the opposite sex. And they will only be impeachable by their own congressional supporters, since criticism from across the aisle will be automatically subjected to reverse impeachment as “partisan.” This is the tawdry legacy of a sub-Camelot court, where unchecked greed, thuggery, and egotism were allowed to operate just above the law, and well beneath contempt.
I composed the title of this book, and had written most of its opening passages, before I was asked to repeat under oath what I had already attested. I regret very much that the only piece of exposed flank, in a sadly successful Clintonian defense based exclusively on Clintonian lies, was offered by the confused testimony of an old friend, who was wrongly placed in the seat where the president should have sat. I had my chance to lie to the House counsel (and to lie transparently at that) or to affect amnesia, or to run out the clock and perhaps later be required to testify against an underling. I decided that in the latter case I would sooner be held in contempt, but it took no time to make up my mind that I wouldn’t protect Clinton’s lies, or help pass them along. I wasn’t going to be the last one left to lie to.
Anyway, it was a pleasure and a privilege to be hated and despised in Clinton’s Washington, and also to discover that those who preached everlasting lenience and the gospel of the “non-judgmental” could at last summon the energy to cast a stone, even if only at myself.
A year or so later, it sometimes seemed as if the whole scandal had never been. By forcing an informal plebiscite not on his own personal and political morality, but on the morality of everybody except himself, Clinton had achieved the acme of corruption that comes with the enlistment of wide and deep complicity. Most politicians can only dream of such an outcome: Huey Long was one. By chance during that bizarre and shame-faced closure I heard a zoologist talking in Georgetown about the relationship between mammals and reptiles. “The reptile,” she said, “can break into the mammal’s nest and destroy and eat all the young, and be burrowed into the still-warm and living flank of the mother, before any reaction is evident. Our anthropomorphic verdict would be that reptiles don’t even know that they are lucky, while mammals don’t really believe that reptiles can exist.”
The impression has been allowed to solidify that there was no price to be paid for all this; that the very definition of political skill was an ability to act without conscience. Appalled by the sheer raw ruthlessness of the President and his defenders, the Republicans and the conservative churches decided to call it a day. Marvin Olasky, the born-again Rightist who had originated the idea of “welfare reform” and been at Newt Gingrich’s elbow, wrote a book on Presidential morality in which he said that if only Clinton had been a more regular churchgoer, and would even now ask for God’s mercy, all might be well. It was not only liberals who failed the test set by Clintonism: the world of the “prayer breakfast” was his ally as surely as were the boardrooms and the Dow Jones. But millions of Americans still realized that something had been lost in the eight years of reptilian rule. The embarrassing emptiness of the 2000 election, especially the loss by the Democratic Party of even the slightest claim to any moral or ethical advantage, is one small symptom of what has been so casually thrown away. Meanwhile, the warm-blooded and the thin-blooded could only discuss the scaly and the remorseless in hushed tones, as the ensuing chapter will demonstrate. Perhaps one day the hot-blooded will have their revenge…
TWELVE was established in August 2005 with the objective of publishing no more than twelve books each year. We strive to publish the singular book, by authors who have a unique perspective and compelling authority. Works that explain our culture; that illuminate, inspire, provoke, and entertain. We seek to establish communities of conversation surrounding our books. Talented authors deserve attention not only from publishers, but from readers as well. To sell the book is only the beginning of our mission. To build avid audiences of readers who are enriched by these works—that is our ultimate purpose.
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ALSO BY CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
BOOKS
Hostage to History: Cyprus from the Ottomans to Kissinger
Blood, Class and Nostalgia: Anglo-American Ironies
Imperial Spoils: The Curious Case of the Elgin Marbles
Why Orwell Matters
No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton
Letters to a Young Contrarian
The Trial of Henry Kissinger
Thomas Jefferson: Author of America
Thomas Paine’s “Rights of Man”: A Biography
God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything
The Portable Atheist
Hitch-22: A Memoir
Arguably: Essays
PAMPHLETS
Karl Marx and the Paris Commune
The Monarchy: A Critique of Britain’s Favorite Fetish
The Missionary Position: Mother
Teresa in Theory and Practice
A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq
ESSAYS
Prepared for the Worst: Essays and Minority Reports
For the Sake of Argument
Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere
Love, Poverty and War: Journeys and Essays
COLLABORATIONS
James Callaghan: The Road to Number Ten (with Peter Kellner)
Blaming the Victims (edited with Edward Said)
When the Borders Bleed: The Struggle of the Kurds (photographs by Ed Kash)
International Territory: The United Nations (photographs by Adam Bartos)
Vanity Fair’s Hollywood (with Graydon Carter and David Friend)
* In April 2000, a Federal Judge found Clinton guilty of a criminal violation of the Privacy Act for this piece of squalor, which was concocted with the First Lady and Sidney Blumenthal.
Contents
Welcome
Dedication
Foreword to the Twelve Edition
Acknowledgments
Preface
Epigraph