George
PRIVATE LIES.
Last October, three months before the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, about two dozen conservative journalists and pundits gathered at La Brasserie, a tony French restaurant on Capitol Hill, to hear GOP representative Bob Barr of Georgia hold forth on a resolution he was about to introduce in the House. The resolution would call for an inquiry of impeachment against President Clinton, and Barr was seeking to enlist the assembled conservatives to drum up public support for the effort. Tellingly, there was no discussion during dinner about the substantive merits of the case for impeachment. Removing Bill Clinton from office was simply assumed to be the goal of everyone in the room, and effecting the coup would be a test not of evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors but of "political will," as Wall Street Journal editorial writer John Fund, one of those present, put it. The debate was only over tactics.
When the Barr resolution, which made unfounded charges of "bribery, obstruction of justice,...withholding evidence, and tampering with evidence," was introduced in November 1997, only 17 House Republicans signed on as co-sponsors. Barr's call for Clinton's ouster was widely dismissed as a political fantasy along the lines of the one scripted by R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr., the editor of The American Spectator, in his 1997 satirical book The Impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton, for which Barr had written the foreword. Asked to comment on Barr's proclamation, Clinton simply chuckled.
One year later, the fantasy looks more like reality, and Barr and Tyrrell, a pair of unlikely political prophets, are the ones smiling. For years, the far right's critique of the Clintons as a baby boomer version of Bonnie and Clyde has been regarded as outlandish propaganda. But now, in the wake of Bill Clinton's admission that he had an "improper" relationship with Monica Lewinsky, that portrayal is bound to be seen as largely vindicated. It may now be difficult for even reasonable people to resist the belief that because one admittedly sensational reality--sex in the Oval Office with a White House intern--pushed forward by Clinton opponents is true, anything and everything they've said about him is true. Or at least plausible.
Even before the president's admission, former FBI agent Gary Aldrich, author of the widely discredited anti-Clinton exposé, Unlimited Access: An FBI Agent Inside the Clinton White House, was being received on the cable chat shows as the Bob Woodward of the Clinton scandals. ON CNBC's Equal Time, co-host Bay Buchanan hailed Aldrich as a truth-teller. Does the truth about the Clintons, one is tempted to ask Buchanan, include the following Aldrich "revelations": pornographic ornaments hanging on a White House Christmas true; Clinton aides copulating on their White House desks; and Hillary Clinton's hiring policy favoring "tough, minority, and lesbian women and weak, minority, and gay men"? Or is it just that since Clinton is now an admitted liar, everyone diametrically opposed to him is right?
Following Clinton's mea culpa speech, his critics were further emboldened. Appearing on CNBC's Rivera Live show, Mark Levin, president of the right-wing Landmark Legal Foundation, gleefully told Rivera, "Actually, it seems to me that I've been right about this for seven months." No matter that Levin's accusations against Clinton have covered far more than the Lewinsky scandal. Clinton's most off-the-wall critics are suddenly respectable, and now, when it comes to accusing Clinton, nothing is too far-fetched.
Before this sort of general revisionism takes full root, it's worth reviewing what the posse of inveterate Clinton haters like Aldrich and Levin--and most of the conservative press and pundit class--would have us believe about the Clintons, in order to separate established fact from paranoid fiction. With Clinton's credibility damaged, it's natural to assume that his detractors' credibility is enhanced. But on the full record, the dishonesty of Clinton's tormentors is all too apparent.
Acting on a tip from Sheffield Nelson, a long-time Clinton foe in Arkansas, during the 1992 campaign, the New York Times broke the Whitewater story--the alleged conflicts of interest arising from a failed land deal and the corruption of a federally backed savings and loan while Clinton was governor. After the Clinton campaign answered the charges, the mainstream press dropped Whitewater. But in right-wing circles, it became an obsession. This was especially true on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, which considered the Clinton presidency illegitimate from its inception. ;The Journal hammered away at Whitewater--and deputy White House counsel Vincent Foster--in the weeks before Foster's death in July 1993. A few months later, following a report in the Washington Times that Whitewater files were removed from Foster's office after his death--a report later proved false--an independent counsel was appointed to investigate the Whitewater affair. Over time, Whitewater became a catchall for all manner of charges against the Clintons, ranging from tax fraud to hush money for Clinton crony Webster Hubbell to Bill Clinton's complicity in an illegal loan. The investigation also came to subsume the travel office firings (did Hillary Clinton conceal her knowledge of the action?) and Filegate (did higher-ups in the White House authorize the ransacking of the FBI files of 900 Reagan and Bush appointees?).
As the official investigations proceeded, the scandals became a cottage industry for the right wing: An unprecedented and unrelenting array of interest groups and editorialists and radio talk-show hosts and Web sites stoked the fires whenever the scandals seemed about to flame out. The Journal would eventually publish three books of innuendo-laden Whitewater-related editorials. The American Spectator launched the multimillion-dollar Arkansas Project, funded by eccentric billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, to dig up dirt on the Clintons, even dredging up a long-discredited story that Bill Clinton was involved in drug smuggling at a remote Arkansas airport. Groups like Floyd Brown's Citizens United, which devised the Willie Horton attack ads against Michael Dukakis, did opposition research on the Clintons; and Larry Klayman's Judicial Watch--also backed by Scaife--used the legal system to do the same. A group calling itself Citizens for Honest Government produced "The Clinton Chronicles" video, a compendium of every scurrilous rumor ever circulated about the Clintons, narrated by Justice Jim Johnson, an infamous Arkansas segregationist who never forgave Clinton for his progressive views on race, and by Larry Nichols, a crackpot former Arkansas state employee whom Bill Clinton fired for making hundreds of phone calls from his office on behalf of the Nicaraguan contras. The video came complete with an endorsement from the Reverend Jerry Falwell, who hawked it on his Old Time Gospel Hour.
Meanwhile, an independent federal agency, the Resolution Trust Corporation, found no evidence of wrongdoing by the Clintons in the Whitewater affair, and Senate and House committees spent several years and several million dollars to reach the same conclusion. Day after day, headlines from Senator Alfonse D'Amato's special Whitewater committee investigation promised new and damning revelations: Bill Clinton had pressured state agencies to give favorable treatment to his business partner James McDougal; Hillary Clinton had obstructed justice in concealing subpoenaed Rose Law Firm billing records in the White House residence. And each day, after testimony was given, the charges evaporated under scrutiny. Desperate Republican aides resorted to doctoring evidence to mislead the public. "We labored mightily and brought forth nothing," as former senator Paul Simon succinctly put it.
Separate congressional investigations of Travelgate and Filegate also turned up no factual basis to substantiate Republican charges of malfeasance by the Clintons. Those mini-fiascoes did reek--but of incompetence, not corruption.
Five years later, the Whitewater case seems to boil down to the word of a sole witness, convicted felon David Hale, who first surfaced through Floyd Brown's operation and is now himself under investigation for allegedly taking Scaife money, funneled through the American Spectator, to tell his tale. (I worked at the Spectator until I became convinced that its journalism was being undermined by its hatred of Clinton.) Perhaps that is why news reports suggest that any Kenneth Starr report to Congress on offenses by the president will not include Whitewater, the initial subject of his inquiry, or Travelgate or Filegate. No matter: The scandal torchbearers carry on.
Clinton may or may not have told the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but in his deposition in the Paula Jones case, but he was surely right when he observed in passing that "the far right tried to convince the American people I had committed murder, run drugs, slept in my mother's bed with four prostitutes, and done numerous other things." Chris Ruddy, a journalist at a Scaife-owned newspaper in Pittsburgh, British writer Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, and conservative gadfly Reed Irvine of Accuracy in Media, concocted elaborate conspiracy theories suggesting that Vince Foster may have been murdered. Radio host G. Gordon Liddy, columnist Bob Novak, and GOP representative Dan Burton lent credence to a "confidential informant" who claimed that Foster's body was carefully laid out in Fort Marcy Park to make the death scene look like a suicide. With a gun and a pumpkin, Burton even re-enacted the alleged murder in his backyard. Rush Limbaugh told millions of listeners that Foster died not in the park but in a suburban Virginia condominium owned by Hillary Clinton. Under pressure from these extremists, independent counsel Ken Starr spent millions in taxpayer funds to investigate and find what was never seriously in dispute--that Foster tragically killed himself at the location where his body was discovered. Faced with Starr's conclusion in the Foster case, Ruddy and Klayman began trafficking in malignant speculation that Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, who died in a 1997 plane crash, was actually murdered, perhaps to cover up the campaign finance scandal. Ruddy posted pictures of Brown's mangled body and bloodied head on his Web site.
Which brings us to Monica. Clinton's real problems in the Lewinsky scandal demonstrate one thing: Given a sustained, well-funded war of personal destruction waged against a flawed politician--when one allegation fails to stick, hurl another--the odds are that pay dirt will eventually be struck. Having withstood a cascade of lies from the right wing for years, Clinton's defenders are justifiably furious with him for having given new ammunition to the enemy.
It's hardly surprising that the sole area where the critics have hit their target is the president's sex life. Nor is it surprising that prosecutor Starr, in search of a sure bet after having come up empty-handed in Whitewater, Travelgate, and Filegate, would hijack the Paula Jones sexual harassment case to prove a charge that prosecutors rarely concern themselves with: that Clinton falsely denied a sexual relationship in a civil case. Friends and foes alike have long recognized that sex is Clinton's irresistible urge, and the foes haven't hesitated in trying to establish that Clinton's personal failing infect his public behavior. As early as 1989, none other than the late Lee Atwater, the brilliant and ruthless GOP strategist, sent operatives to Arkansas to inject Clinton sex stories into the 1990 governor's race in a preemptive strike to take Clinton, whom Atwater viewed as the strongest challenger to George Bush's re-election, out of the running for president in 1992. In 1990, at a press conference attended by Clinton gubernatorial opponent Sheffield Nelson, Larry Nichols unveiled a wrongful-dismissal lawsuit against Clinton in which the names of Clinton's alleged lover, including Gennifer Flowers, were first floated. Atwater, who sought forgiveness for his savagery on his death bed, died before his plan could be fully executed. Nearly eight years after his death, that plan has been carried out--though it may be a comment on the state of the GOP political infrastructure that scandal-book agent Lucianne Goldberg stood in for Atwater.
We now know that Clinton has had consensual sex with Flowers and Lewinsky. But are we suddenly obliged to think that this is just the tip of the sexual iceberg? It's probably fair to assume that these aren't the only two times in 23 years that Clinton has strayed from his wedding vows. Simply because Clinton had sex with Lewinsky does not now legitimize the veracity of every sex-related accusation made against him. Jones practically leaped forward after Clinton's Lewinsky speech to proclaim vindication, and recent polls show that the public is now inclined to believer her, though past polls showed the majority of people did not. Yet it is quite a leap from an admission of consensual sex to conviction on sexual harassment charges in a case dismissed by a court as too weak to go to trial. Kathleen Willey? Two witnesses--including Clinton nemesis Linda Tripp--contradict Wiley's version of events. And what about back in Arkansas: Are we to credit interviews given by Arkansas state troopers in which they claimed to have procured dozens of women for Bill Clinton, or the later sworn testimony of two of the troopers who said they were paid to lie to reporters? Should we believe Gary Aldrich's claim that Clinton stole out of the White House under a blanket in the backseat of aide Bruce Lindsey's car to tryst with women at Washington's Marriott Hotel--even though the Secret Service issued a statement saying that it would be impossible for the president to slip his security detail? How about the story pursued in 1992 by Floyd Brown operative David Bossie (who went on to work as an investigator for D'Amato and Burton) of a former Clinton law student from the 1970s who committed suicide while pregnant? In Jones's 700-page legal filing--put together with the benefit of an 800 number and money from another conservative group, the Rutherford Institute--we are asked to believe that Clinton is a rapist, according to a story told by a man who claimed to be a friend of the victim's. (I've interviewed this man myself; he wanted to be paid to go on the record.) The woman in question denied the story.
About the only salacious rumor I've heard that didn't make it into the Jones filing is the one--so prevalent in political circles that it was fictionalized in Primary Colors--about Clinton's having fathered the child of an African-American prostitute named Bobbie Ann Williams. A likeness of the alleged love child was reproduced in leaflets distributed around Little Rock in 1991 by Robert "Say" McIntosh, a local activist. The charge hit the tabloids in a 1992 interview with Williams. It turned out that the woman featured in the paper wasn't Williams at all but rather her sister, out to make a quick buck.
As difficult as it may be for the general public to fathom, Arkansas's political culture has a rich history of personal intrigue in which wild sex stories do feature prominently. Though the statement may not have been accurate as applied to Jones, James Carville's lament that you can hear just about anything about Clinton by dragging a $100 bill through an Arkansas trailer park was exactly right. Sit in the Capitol Bar, in downtown Little Rock, for a few nights, and you can be told that virtually every public figure in the state is a rapacious womanizer and is also gay--including Clinton. Even Hillary Clinton was not spared this treatment: One can hear that she was having an affair with Vince Foster and also that she is a lesbian, often from the same lascivious gossips.
Clinton is not the drug-running, homicidal monster portrayed in "The Clinton Chronicles," nor is he the evil Nixonian corrupter of our public institutions that the Wall Street Journal imagines. Whether Clinton resigns, is impeached, or holds on to office, six years after he was elected president, the only thing the right has succeeded in proving about him is something that the American public concluded on its own before voting for him: That Clinton is an adulterer who, like most any adulterer, dissembles when caught.
It may be years after the Lewinsky saga plays out before we gain the perspective to weigh the value of this revelation against the costs. The prerogatives of the presidency have been greatly weakened by the forced testimony of Secret Service agents and White House lawyers in the Starr investigation. A president has been humiliated, in the eyes of Americans and the world. When it comes to making policy, the Clinton administration has been hobbled, perhaps beyond repair. Our politics have been poisoned, changed forever, and surely not for the better. Future leaders can expect unbridled intrusiveness, both from political foes and from a Washington press corps that has abandoned its traditional role as neutral reporter of fact and set itself up as moral arbiter, a role it does not have the standing to assume.
Finally, public discourse has been debased, especially on the right. A few years back, serious magazines such as The Weekly Standard eschewed scandal politics. Unable to assail Clinton on the issues, even right-win intellectuals have given way to sleazy rumor-mongering. In recent months, The Weekly Standard 's contribution to public debate has been to print an old photo of Bill Clinton leering suggestively at an attractive flight attendant whose thigh he appears to be fondling. Ideas have consequences, conservatives used to say. So, too, does political pornography.