This obtuse righteousness is inscribed in every move, physical or political, that the Clintons make. Neither ever offers—for all their tin-roof “humility”—a word of self-criticism. The president has been told for many years, by advisers who in some cases adore him, that he must not speak for too long when given the podium. His prolixity remains stubborn and incurable, yet it remains a fact that in all his decades of logorrhea Clinton has failed to make a single remark (absent some lame catch phrases like “New Covenant” and of course the imperishable “It all depends on what the meaning of ‘is’ is”) that could possibly adhere to the cortex of a thinking human being. The Oval Office may have presented itself to him as a potentially therapeutic location, but once he arrived there he half realized that he had no big plans, no grand thoughts, no noble dreams. He also realized that he might have to give up one of the few things that did bring him release from his demons. He lost little time in substituting the one for the other, and reacted with extreme indignation when confronted with the disclosure of the fact. This was the empty rage of Caliban glimpsing his visage in the glass. It was not the first such instance, or even the most revealing. The driveling idiom of therapy was his only alternative to red-faced self-righteousness, as when he was interviewed in September 1998:
You know some people say to me, “I feel so terrible for you. It’s been so awful what has been publicized to the whole country; the whole world.” Believe it or not, and I know it’s hard for people to believe, that has not bothered me very much because of the opportunity I’ve had to seek spiritual counseling and advice and to think through this and to try to focus much more on how I can properly atone, how I can be forgiven, and then how I can go back to healing with my family.
A month later he was to describe his short-lived public-relations triumph at the disastrous Wye agreement with Benjamin Netanyahu and Yasir Arafat, as a step on his own “path of atonement.” And two months after that, it was bombs away again over Baghdad. Mrs. Ceausescu must have had days of ministry like this.
As early as April 1993, according to an eyewitness account given to Bob Woodward for his book The Agenda, Clinton found himself with nothing to propose, and nothing to give away. He had been told that the bond market and its managers had boxed him in. He lost his temper to an operatic degree. “I hope you’re all aware we’re all Eisenhower Republicans,” he bellowed to his team. “We’re Eisenhower Republicans here, and we are fighting with Reagan Republicans. We stand for lower deficits and free trade and the bond market. Isn’t that great?… We must have something for the common man. It won’t hurt me in 1994, and I can put enough into ’95 and ’96 to crawl through to reelection. At least we’ll have health care to give them, if we can’t give them anything else.”
I cannot guess what it’s like for a Democratic loyalist to read that bombast now.
The Republicanism of Clinton’s presidency has not, in fact, risen to the Eisenhower level. He has entrusted policy to much more extreme Republicans like Alan Greenspan and Dick Morris, without manifesting any of the old general’s robust suspicion of the military-industrial complex. (And it’s impossible to imagine Eisenhower, who always showed contempt for his venal vice president, making the spectacle of himself that Clinton made at Nixon’s graveside.)
In 1996 I wrote an attack on the “lesser evil” theory of political choice, which was printed in Dissent magazine and discussed at its editorial board. There the editor, Michael Walzer, inquired plaintively: “Why is it that some people on the Left seem to hate Bill Clinton?” I thought then, and I think even more now, that the mystery lies elsewhere. Why do so many people on the Right hate Bill Clinton?
Of course, there’s an element of the stupid party involved: the conservatives thought Franklin Roosevelt was a communist even as he saved capital from itself by means of the National Recovery Act. But Bill Clinton, who has gone further than Reagan ever dared in repealing the New Deal and seconding the social Darwinist ethic at home and abroad, is nonetheless detested on the Right. The old slogan, “draft-dodging, pot-smoking, lying, womanizing sonofabitch” still resonates. As why should it not, given that a person of such qualities has been able to annex and even anticipate the Republican platform, thereby demonstrating conclusively that there is no sufficient or necessary connection between the said platform and personal honor, or political honesty? At least Trent Lott and Newt Gingrich and the Christian Coalition got something for their frustration: the sight of Bomber Bill carrying a large Bible from prayer breakfast to prayer breakfast while ordering the downtrodden to shape up, and the war planes to discipline the wogs, and the military production lines to restart.
Walzer’s question, at least in its inverted form, remains. It’s become tiring to hear people on the Left say that Clinton should perhaps be arraigned, but not for anything he’s actually been charged with. A vast number of liberal academics and intellectuals wouldn’t even go that far, preferring to place themselves under the leadership of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., as he instructed the Congress that a gentleman was obliged to lie, under any duress, in matters of sex. (Also that: “Only a cad tells the truth about his love affairs.”) This polka-dotted popinjay has been himself permitted to lie, these many years, about the record of the Kennedy gang. But not until now had he been called as a witness on who is, or is not, a gentleman, let alone about what is, or is not, a “love affair.” (On caddishness he perhaps does possess real historical expertise that was, alas, not sought by the House Judiciary Committee.) His nominee for the title of gentleman, however, was certainly in keeping with the standards he has upheld until now. Gentlemen are indeed supposed to be discreet about affairs, at any hazard to themselves, in order to protect the honor and modesty of the ladies involved. This doesn’t quite track with Clinton’s policy of maintaining a semi-official staff for the defamation and bullying of inconvenient but truthful former girlfriends: “the politics of personal destruction” elevated into an annex of the state machine. It is not “philandering”—a term of some dash and gaiety that has been much abused—to hit on the help and then threaten dire reprisals. A gentleman, having once implied that Gennifer Flowers was a lying gold digger, does not make it up to her, or to those he misled, by agreeing in a surly manner years later that perhaps he did sleep with her “once.” All other considerations to one side, doesn’t he know that it’s the height of bad manners to make love to somebody only once? Those who claim to detect, in the widespread loathing of Clinton, an aggressive “culture war” against the freedom-loving sixties should be forced to ask themselves if Clinton, with his almost sexless conquests and his eerie affectless claim that the female felt no pleasure, represents the erotic freedom that they had in mind. (After the Juanita Broaddrick revelations, Schlesinger was not given the opportunity to say that a gentleman is obliged, if only from gallantry, to lie about rape.)
There remains the irony of Amendments 413 and 415 of Clinton’s own crime bill, signed into law in September 1994, which permit a defendant in a sexual harassment lawsuit to be asked under oath about his other sexual entanglements. Lobbied by certain feminists for the inclusion of these amendments, Clinton had professed himself shocked that such a law was not already on the books. Thus when caught in his own law, and required by a Supreme Court vote of 9–0 to answer the questions, Clinton would commit various common law crimes if he decided to do other than tell the truth, let alone if he decided to recruit subordinates to lie. He would also be committing a crime that it is only in his power to commit—a direct violation of the presidential oath of office.
Gore Vidal was perhaps more honest than Schlesinger, and certainly more accurate, when he explained 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… Clinton doesn’t much care for Warm Mature Relationships with Warm Caring Women. Hence an addiction to the impersonal blowjob.” When he wrote this, Mr. Vidal was emerging as a defender of the president and a friend of the First Lady. I e
cho the desire of my friend Geoffrey Wheatcroft to see Hillary Clinton sitting next to Vidal “nodding gravely while he says that.”
Is it not in fact rather clear that Clinton’s conduct in the Lewinsky and Jones and Willey cases represents a microcosm of Clintonism itself? There is, first and most saliently, the use of public office for private ends and gratification. The bodyguards bring the chick to the room, just as in any banana republic, and the witnesses can be taken care of in the usual way, and the man who later uses the Lincoln Bedroom as an off-the-record rental for fat cats thinks nothing of claiming the Oval Office as a chambre particulier. There is, again, the fact that Monica Lewinsky was originally supplied to the White House on the recommendation of Walter Kaye, a bored and wealthy nonentity who later testified that he could not remember how much he had donated to Clintonian funds. (The relationship between the Kathleen Willey cover-up and Nathan Landow makes a similar point in a slightly different way.) There is, in a recurring pattern, the use of that other fund-raiser and influence-peddler Vernon Jordan to arrange soft landings and “deniability.” There is, very conspicuously, the automatic resort to the use of publicly paid officials (some with their consent but most without) as liars and hacks for a supposedly “private and personal” matter. And where they fail, lawyers from the school of Cochran and Dershowitz—loophole artists for rich thugs—are flung into the breach. Scarcely worth noticing, as being too predictable for words, is the employment of White House full-timers to spread the idea that Ms. Lewinsky was “a stalker”—as if a president, who surrounded the executive mansion with ugly concrete barriers out of concern for his personal safety, and who is protected night and day by men who are paid to take a bullet for him, could be unsafe from harassment in his “own” Oval Office.
Most telling, in a way, was the smearing of Ms. Jones as a woman so common and dirty that she might even have enjoyed an encounter with Clinton or, depending on which cover story was which, might have been actuated by the sort of greed only found in trailer parks. Here is the real contempt with which Clinton and his circle view the gullible rubes who make up their voting base: “those people whose toil and sweat sends us here and pays our way,” as Clinton oleaginously phrased it in his banal first inaugural address. Since that speech, he has never voluntarily spent any time in the company of anyone who earns money rather than makes it. And, when told by the United States Supreme Court that he had to answer questions from an apparent female nobody, under the terms of a statute on sexual harassment that he had himself caused to be made law, he decided that he could lie his way out as he always had. It’s not much of a riposte, at this point, for Clinton’s people to say that the unfashionable nobody had some shady right-wing friends. However shady they were, they didn’t fall to the standard of Dick Morris.
When I look out of my window in Washington, D.C., I am forced to confront the statue of General McClellan, which stands isolated in traffic at the confluence of Connecticut Avenue and Columbia Road. The worst commander on either side in the Civil War, he was rightly suspected of surreptitious pro-slavery political ambitions and indeed ran against Lincoln as a Democrat for the Presidency. His equestrian figure, whether by accident or design, still has him pointing his horse away from the enemy and toward the White House. Accepting the Democratic Party’s nomination on July 16, 1992, Clinton made the most of his Dixie drawl as he said: “I know how President Lincoln felt when General McClellan wouldn’t attack in the Civil War. He asked him, ‘If you’re not going to use your army, may I borrow it?’ And so I say: ‘George Bush, if you won’t use your power to help people, step aside. I will.’ ”
Karl Marx predicted McClellan’s firing by Lincoln, and accused the supposedly timorous general of an ill-concealed sympathy for the other side. In demanding that Bush hand him the reins, Clinton pretended that government would and should still be “activist” for the powerless. But he was, in fact, a stealthy envoy from the enemy camp. In power, he has completed the Reagan counter-revolution and made the state into a personal friend of those who are already rich and secure. He has used his armed forces in fits of pique, chiefly against the far-off and the unpopular, and on dates which suit his own court calendar. The draft dodger has mutated into a pliant serf of the Pentagon, the pot smoker into the chief inquisitor in the “war on drugs,” and the womanizer into a boss who uses subordinates as masturbatory dolls. But the liar and the sonofabitch remain, and who will say that these qualities played no part in the mutation?
FIVE
Clinton’s War Crimes
Toward the end of the amputated and perfunctory impeachment process, a small bleat was set up on the Internet and in the pages of America’s half-dead Left and liberal press. “Impeach President Clinton,” said the appeal, “But For the Right Reasons.” The signatories had noticed that Clinton used unbridled executive power to make war in what used to be called the Third World. But they thought that this ought to be sharply distinguished from his other promiscuities.
Reality, however, did not admit of any such distinction. In this instance, perhaps more than any other, Clinton’s private vileness meshed exactly with his brutal and opportunistic public style. In idle moments, I used to amuse myself with the defining slogan of the herbivorous Left: “Think globally, act locally.” It always seemed to me just as persuasive, and just about as inspiring, if phrased the other way around. How satisfying, then, that when Clinton acted globally, and did so for the most “localized” and provincial motives, it should have been the Left who were the last to see it.
This essay of mine, slightly adapted from its original form, appeared in Vanity Fair just as the predetermined vote on impeachment was coming up in the Senate. It shows the failure of all political forces to examine the most crucial, and the least scrutinized, of the failed counts of impeachment. That count is Abuse of Power.
This is an essay about canines. It concerns, first, the president of the United States and commander in chief of the U.S. armed forces, whose character was once memorably caught by a commentator in his native Arkansas who called him “a hard dog to keep on the porch.” It concerns, second, the dog or dogs which did not bark in the nighttime. (In the Sherlock Holmes tale “Silver Blaze,” the failure of such a beast to give tongue—you should pardon the expression—was the giveaway that exposed his master as the intruder.) And it concerns, third, the most famous dog of 1998: the dog that was wagged by its own tail. Finally, it concerns the dogs of war, and the circumstances of their unleashing.
Not once but three times last year, Bill Clinton ordered the use of cruise missiles against remote and unpopular countries. On each occasion, the dispatch of the missiles coincided with bad moments in the calendar of his long and unsuccessful struggle to avoid impeachment. Just before the Lewinsky affair became public in January 1998, there was a New York prescreening party for Barry Levinson’s movie Wag the Dog, written by Hilary Henkin and David Mamet. By depicting a phony president starting a phony war in order to distract attention from his filthy lunge at a beret-wearing cupcake, this film became the political and celluloid equivalent of a Clintonian roman à clef. Thrown by Jane Rosenthal and Robert DeNiro, whose Tribeca Productions produced the movie, the party featured Dick Morris and an especially pleased and excited Richard Butler, who was described by an eyewitness as “glistening.” Mr. Morris was Mr. Clinton’s fabled and unscrupulous adviser on matters of public opinion. Mr. Butler was the supervisor of United Nations efforts to disarm Saddam Hussein’s despotism. In February 1998, faced with a threatened bombing attack that never came, Iraqi state TV prophylactically played a pirated copy of Wag the Dog in prime time. By Christmastime 1998, Washington police officers were giving the shove to demonstrators outside the White House who protested the December 16–19 bombing of Iraq with chants of “Killing children’s what they teach—that’s the crime they should impeach” and a “No blood for blow jobs” placard.
Is it possible—is it even thinkable—that these factors are in any way related? “In order that he mig
ht rob a neighbor whom he had promised to defend,” wrote Macaulay in 1846 of Frederick the Great, “black men fought on the coast of Coromandel, and red men scalped each other by the Great Lakes of North America.” Did, then, a dirtied blue dress from the Gap cause widows and orphans to set up grieving howls in the passes of Afghanistan, the outer precincts of Khartoum, and the wastes of Mesopotamia? Is there only a Hollywood link between Clinton’s carnality and Clinton’s carnage? Was our culture hit by weapons of mass distraction? Let us begin with the best-studied case, which is Khartoum.
On August 20, 1998, the night of Monica Lewinsky’s return to the grand jury and just three days after his dismal and self-pitying nonapology had “bombed” on prime-time TV, Clinton personally ordered missile strikes against the El Shifa Pharmaceutical Industries Company on the outskirts of Sudan’s capital city. The Clinton administration made three allegations about the El Shifa plant:
That it did not make, as it claimed, medicines and veterinary products.
That it did use the chemical EMPTA (O-ethyl methylphosphonothioic acid), which is a “precursor,” or building block, in the manufacture of VX nerve gas.
That it was financed by Osama bin Laden—the sinister and fanatical Saudi entrepreneur wanted in connection with lethal attacks on U.S. embassies in Africa—or by his shadowy business empire.