All of the above had to be endured, in order that gay and feminist and civil rights and civil libertarian forces could “come together” in the midterm elections of November 1998, and exclaim almost with one voice that racism and oligarchy threatened their president and his spouse, and that government should be kept out of the bedroom.
A single expression, culled from that bizarre period and kept (at least by this reviewer) like a fragrant petal pressed between the leaves of an old and cherished book, will do duty for the entire period of hysterical illusion. I shall preserve it lovingly, until long after those who uttered it have pretended with embarrassment that they never did. That expression is “the coup.” Which Clintonoid columnist or propagandist did not employ this dramatic phrase, as their hero found himself at the mercy, not of a law ’n’ order Democrat on the approved model, but of a law ’n’ order Republican? (The most the Republican leadership could have hoped to achieve was the confirmation of Al Gore as President two years before his time—some coup.) The term coup refers, properly as well as metaphorically, to an abrupt seizure of power by unelected forces, along the lines of the pronunciamenti so well remembered by our southern neighbors. It is sometimes given its full dignity in French as coup d’état, or “blow at the state,” and was in that form employed by many of the outraged Democrats who took the floor of the House on December 19, 1998. Their outrage was directed not at any action of their commander in chief but at any motion to depose him or even to impugn his character.
On that day, Clinton ordered the smiting of Mesopotamia. At the time, this decision seemed to complete his adoption of the military-industrial worldview, though in fact his full and absolute conversion to that theology lay two weeks ahead. One may also find the origins of his conversion in his past. Clinton’s relationship with the unelected and unaccountable uniformed para-state is, in some ways, an old story. It is known that he opposed the war on Vietnam, and it is also known that he dodged, rather than resisted, the draft. The distinction is not without a difference. Looking back, George Stephanopoulos shudders to recall the moment in 1992 when a reporter handed him a Xeroxed copy of Clinton’s draft notice. This, after candidate Clinton assured him that no such summons had ever been issued, and instructed him to say as much. It was later to emerge that candidate Clinton believed that all known copies of the document had been weeded from the files. In other words, Clinton borrowed the moral prestige of the antiwar movement in order to shield his own skin.
I myself recall reading with keen interest Clinton’s 1969 letter to his draft board when news of it broke. Obviously wasted on the colonel to whom it was addressed, it breathes with much of the spirit of those most defensible of days. Clinton had written of “working every day with a depth of feeling I had reserved solely for racism in America before Vietnam.” And he had protested having to “fight and kill and die” in such a war, with the verbs not only in the morally correct order but repeated as “fight, kill and maybe die” lower down. Anyone who believes that the objection of antiwar activists was to personal danger rather than to complicity in atrocity and aggression just wasn’t there at the time. Also redolent of the period was Clinton writing in the same letter, “I decided to accept the draft in spite of my beliefs for one reason: to maintain my political viability within the system.” “Within the system” is vintage 1960s, but now I wonder. Who else of that band of brave and cheerful young Americans, so apparently selfless in their opposition to their country’s disgrace, was asking, “How will this play in New Hampshire in around 1992?” The thought gave me the creeps, though perhaps it shouldn’t have. Someone had to be thinking about the long haul, I suppose. But I would bet a goodly sum that most of those concerned were not planning much beyond the downfall of Richard Nixon. A calculating young man this Clinton, in any event.
Once elected, he never even pretended that civilian control was the operative principle. Harry Truman, no friend of the white feather or the conscientious objector, fired General Douglas MacArthur without overmuch hesitation when he challenged presidential authority, and withstood the subsequent opinion-poll and populist riot, and probably lost no more shut-eye than he did when incinerating Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (“New Democrats” in that epoch knew how to be tough.) Bill Clinton was no sooner elected than, bullied by the Joint Chiefs, he broke his election promise to open the ranks to gays. He then allowed Colin Powell, the hero of Panama and My Lai, to dictate a policy of capitulation to the junta in Haiti and the national socialists in Belgrade. And he catered faithfully to military-industrial constituencies, supporting exorbitant weapons-building projects like the Seawolf submarine, in which even the Pentagon had lost interest. No matter how fanciful or budget-busting the concept, from the B-1 bomber upward, Clinton always relaxed his commitment to trimming government spending and invariably advocated not only a welfare “safety net” for the likes of General Dynamics and Boeing, but a handout free and clear.
This had been standard practice among Democratic aspirants during the haunted years of the contest with Soviet Russia, where “softness” was at an understandable discount among sophisticated and ambitious liberals. However, Mr. Clinton was the first postwar and post–Cold War president. His “watch” occurred during a unique and unprecedented period of military and political relaxation, when the totalitarian codes of “launch on warning” and “balance of terror” had been abandoned even by many of their former advocates. Let the record show, then, that the Clinton White House took no step of any kind to acknowledge, much less take advantage of this new reality, and always acted as if the most paranoid predictions of John Foster Dulles were about to be fulfilled. With the help of a tremendous lobbying effort from the aerospace and other defense conglomerates, the NATO alliance was “enlarged,” at least partly to furnish a sales market for those in “the contractor community” who would otherwise have had to close production lines. The budget of the Central Intelligence Agency was increased, while Democratic “oversight” of its activity was held to a myopic level and even the records of its past activities in Guatemala, Chile, and Iran were shrouded or shredded (illegally at that) without demur. The Clinton administration contrived the feat of being the only major government in the West to make no comment on the arrest of General Pinochet, despite the existence of outstanding cases of American citizens murdered on his direct instructions. The promiscuous sale of arms and technology to other countries, including existing dictatorships as well as potential ones, was enthusiastically pursued. Not an eyebrow was raised when the “special forces” of the Indonesian army, trained and equipped for the sole purpose of combating malcontent Indonesian civilians, were found to have been supervised by United States authorities in open defiance of a supposed congressional ban.
Conducting relations with the bankrupt and humiliated “former superpower,” Clinton and his understrappers Strobe Talbott and Sandy Berger followed a policy which history may well remember, of always covering up for their diseased autocratic marionette Boris Yeltsin when he was wrong (in Chechnya and in Bosnia and in Mafia matters) and always weakening him when he was in the right (as in their breaches of promise about the expansion of NATO and the demolition of the ABM treaty). No doubt they considered his bleary, raging, oafish conduct to be a “private” issue, kept as it was from being investigated by any legal authority in the new Russia.
In a manner which actually mirrors rather than contradicts the above, Bill Clinton sometimes did find the strength and the nerve to disagree with his military chiefs. He overruled them when they expressed doubts on the rocketing of Khartoum and Afghanistan in August 1998. But on that occasion, he had urgent political reasons of his own to wish to “stand tall.” All was made whole on January 6, 1999, when the president announced, even as the Senate was convening on his impeachment, that the dearest wish of the Joint Chiefs and the Republican Right would be granted after all. After twenty years and $55 billion spent on a series of completely unsuccessful “tests,” he promised that an actual $7 billion would be set as
ide to build a “Star Wars” missile system. The figure, much understated, was in a sense irrelevant, because the promise to “build,” rather than to experiment, was the threshold which neither Reagan nor Bush had crossed. But Clinton claimed, in his State of the Union address in January 1999, that there had been a terrible shortfall in military expenditure since the middle of 1985—high noon of the Reagan era. Triangulation could go no further.
A September report in the New York Times completes the picture. Leaked by someone close to the Joint Chiefs, it shows the president—a king of shreds and patches—summoned to a uniformed conclave at the National Defense University in Fort McNair and there informed that he has lost his moral standing as commander in chief, because laws enforceable on officers and other ranks have been flouted by himself. Within weeks, he was proffering a hitherto unbudgeted increase in military spending of $110 billion over six years—another boost to big government for the rich and another reminder of good government for the poor. Along with the mooted handover of Social Security funds to Wall Street, this was the fabled “agenda” from which, according to solemn Democratic commentators, the country was being distracted by a distressing focus on the president’s personal crookery. The cover-up and the “agenda,” however, soon became indistinguishable as Clinton played out the bipartisan hand to the end.
In the Clinton administration’s relationship with the international community, the policy of triangulation almost satirizes itself. Thanks to an unusually warm and fetid relationship between Senator Jesse Helms on the one hand—he being chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee—and Ms. Madeleine Albright on the other, the Clinton administration was and is the only important negative vote on the establishment of a land mines treaty, and on the setting up of an international body to try war criminals. (The other noteworthy “contras” are Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Colonel Qaddafi’s Libya.) The same administration also uses the UN as a ditto for U.S. unilateralism, all the time contemptuously refusing to pay its dues to the world body.
“Globalization,” usually the company song of the American corporate strategy, stops at the water’s edge and turns prickly and isolationist when it comes to the rights of others to judge American actions. This dualism was seen to perfect effect when Clinton supported the Jesse Helms and Dan Burton legislation, which not merely intensified the stupid embargo on Cuba but presumptuously extended it into an attack on trade with Havana conducted by third countries like Canada, France, or Great Britain. This covert understanding is arrived at by means of a sweetheart deal with Dick Morris’s former boss in North Carolina.
Over the course of seven precious and irrecoverable years of potential peace and disarmament, then, Clinton has squandered every conceivable opportunity for a renegotiated world order. He has been the front-man for a silent coup rather than the victim of one, and has learned, for a bad combination of private and public motives, to stop worrying and to love all bombs.
FOUR
A Question of Character
At the initial moment of the Clinton campaign in 1992, there was much pompous talk about the question of “character.” This was relatively easily deflected by those who maintained, and also by those who were paid to maintain, that “issues” should weigh more than “personalities.” And, at that same initial moment, the line that favored issues over personalities seemed to many people the more serious one—the one for the high-minded to take. One can still hear this echo, like the last squeak from a dying planet, in the automatic response of those poll respondents and other loyalists who say that they care more about health insurance than about Monica Lewinsky.
Well, I could sign my own name to that proposition. But could Clinton? And wasn’t that the point to begin with? In 1992, it seemed to many people that the late Paul Tsongas, a man of probity and competence and fiscal integrity, was the authentic “New Democrat.” A bit bloodless perhaps, and a bit low on compassion, but an efficient technocrat and a modernizer. Mr. Clinton had nothing substantial to put against Tsongas’s program. He just thought that he, and not Mr. Tsongas, should be the nominee and the one who enjoyed the fruits of office. So “personality” came into it from the start, and all denials of that fact are idle. Not one—I repeat, not one—of Clinton’s team in 1992 did not harbor the fear that a “flaw” might embarrass and even humiliate everybody. Was this not a recognition of the character issue, however oblique? Some thought it would be funny money, some thought it would be “bimbo eruptions,” a few guessed that it would be a sordid combination of the two. All were prepared to gloss it over in favor of the big picture, of getting the job done, or of getting a job for themselves.
The Establishment injunction—to focus on “issues” and “concerns” and “agendas” rather than mere “personalities”—is overripe for the garbage heap. The whole apparatus of professionalized and privatized political management is devoted to the idea of “the candidate,” and it is to a person with a memory for names and faces, rather than to any computer-generated manifesto, that donors at home and abroad give large sums of money that the newspapers don’t discover until it’s too late. Moreover, the judgment of “character” is one of the few remaining decisions that an otherwise powerless and unconsulted voter is able to make for himself (or, and here I defer to Ann Lewis, for herself). Simply put, a candidate can change his/her campaign platform when in office, but he/she cannot change his/her nature. Even more simply put, the honest and the powerless have a vested interest in a politician who cannot be bought, whereas the powerful and the dishonest have already begun to haggle over the tab while the acceptance speech is still being written. And, even in a political system renowned worldwide for its venality, Bill Clinton seemed anxious to be bought, and willing if not indeed eager to advertise the fact in advance.
Venturing, then, onto the territory of sociopathy, one can notice some other filiations between the public and private Clinton. There is, clearly, something very distraught in his family background. Our physicians tell us that that thirst for approval is often the outcome of a lonely or insecure childhood (and Clinton’s entire menu of initiatives, from provincial governor to provincial president, betrays a preoccupation with the small and wheedling and ingratiating effect), but what about this, from Hillary Clinton’s book It Takes a Village? In 1986, Chelsea Clinton was six:
One night at the dinner table, I told her, “You know, Daddy is going to run for governor again. If he wins, we would keep living in this house, and he would keep trying to help people. But first we have to have an election. And that means other people will try and convince voters to vote for them instead of for Daddy. One of the ways they may do this is by saying terrible things about him.” Chelsea’s eyes went wide, and she asked, “What do you mean?” We explained that in election campaigns, people might even tell lies about her father in order to win, and we wanted her to be ready for that. Like most parents, we had taught her that it was wrong to lie, and she struggled with the idea, saying over and over, “Why would people do that?” I didn’t have an answer for that one. (I still don’t.) Instead, we asked her to pretend she was her dad and was making a speech about why people should vote for her. She said something like, “I’m Bill Clinton. I’ve done a good job and I’ve helped a lot of people. Please vote for me.” We praised her and explained that now her daddy was going to pretend to be one of the men running against him. So Bill said terrible things about himself, like how he was really mean to people and didn’t try to help them. Chelsea got tears in her eyes and said, “Why would anybody say things like that?”
According to the First Lady, it took several repeats of this “role-playing” exercise before the kid stopped crying. Heaven knows what things are like now, with the daddy president having used the same child as a prop to gull the public between January and August 1998. He’s not much better with the more mature females, either. Mr. Clinton held precisely two Cabinet meetings—count them—in 1998. At the first one, immediately after the first Lewinsky revelation in January, he conv
ened his team and asked them to step outside in the street and echo his falsehoods, which many of them did. At the second one, in August, he told them that he was moving to Plan B, and telling some part of the truth. Donna Shalala thereupon asked him if he had not, perhaps, put his own interests above those of his colleagues and even—heaven forbid—his agenda. At once, and according to eyewitnesses, the supposedly contrite chief executive whirled upon her. “If it was up to you, Nixon would have been better than Kennedy in 1960.” There was a craven silence in the room—anyone who had lasted that long with Clinton must already have had a self-respect deficit that a lifetime won’t requite—but afterward someone was heard to murmur thoughtfully: “He’ll say anything.”
I have known a number of people who work for and with, or who worked for and with, this man. They act like cult members while they are still under the spell, and talk like ex–cult members as soon as they have broken away. Even the disgraced Webster Hubbell, whose loyalty to Clinton is based on cronyism and on the old requirement of knowing what to do for the boss without having to be told, has had his moments of anxiety. Promoted from the revolving-door back-slappery of the Arkansas “business community” to the halls of the Justice Department, he was taken to one side by the new president and “tasked” with two occult inquiries. “Find out who killed Kennedy, and tell me whether there are UFOs or not.” At other moments, staff have been asked to Camp David to meet with “enablers” and other shamans of the New Age. The vacuous language of uplift and therapy, commingled with the tawdry pieties of Baptist and Methodist hypocrisy, clings to both Clintons like B.O. It was suggested by the First Lady herself that her husband’s off-the-record meetings with a female intern were a form of “ministry.”