My mother has never liked Ted Kennedy’s politics. But throughout my childhood,
she would always conclude one of her anti-Ted diatribes with some remark like
“but no one deserves to lose two brothers the way he did,” or “his mother Rose is
a strong woman.” When the American public remained unchanged in its feeling for
President Clinton throughout the Starr investigation, there was a similar dynamic
going on. People might be angry at the president for sinning (and sinning and
sinning), but they never lost sight of the personal nature of Clinton’s
crimes and, I think, the brutal agony they must have visited upon Chelsea. It
angered a lot of Republicans that the public wouldn’t separate the man from
the office.
Probably no Republican was more enraged by this failure than Kenneth Starr. In
his new book, “Shadow,” Bob Woodward offers a few glimpses inside Starr’s office and
what one sees is not only the pervert-run-amok we all know and love, but just a
generally weird guy. Starr is shown having immense “respect” for lofty
institutions and statutes and protocols, but recklessly unconcerned with the tiny
human scale of this scandal.
Clinton’s flaw is exactly the opposite. After the grueling four-hour
grand jury inquisition in which he painstakingly explained how his penis came to
be touched by this girl’s mouth and then laid out his miserable argument that
this technically did not constitute sexual relations by the Jones’ definition,
Woodward reports: “Clinton shook Starr’s hand and put his other hand on Starr’s
shoulder.” That kind of physical contact is much more revolting than anything
Monica Lewinsky ever did.
But it is Starr who has the Freudian need to separate the man from the office
(which he tried to literally enact, I suppose). “My mother taught me never to
hate anyone,” he says, ` la “Forest Gump.” “You can hate what they do, but don’t
hate the person.”
I hear that sentiment a lot these days. I have no idea what it means.
The day Starr’s men first argue to subpoena Clinton, Woodward reports: “Starr
agreed that there was no question they had the law on their side, but he was
still reluctant. He seemed determined about Clinton but squeamish about the
presidency.” In fact, Starr so often relies upon this curious distinction,
Woodward puts it in his index:
Starr, Kenneth Winston
presidency respected by, 286, 252, 400, 436
When Starr’s staff argues that they don’t have enough good evidence, according to
statutory section 595(c), to trigger a referral recommending impeachment, Starr
says, “I feel like I’ve been in 595(c) territory since the spring, and I have
a statutory obligation to get this to Congress.” For Starr, the landscape of
the world is an endless vista of 595(c) territory, populated only by his own
cramped interpretations of the law. People never figure in.
And this is where Starr got it all wrong. Good judges must consider the often
pathetic human motives underlying even the harshest facts. Then they apply the
law and then make a “judgment” — hence the job title. That’s why independent counsels
who investigated the treasonous activities of the Iran-Contra affair could leave
Ronald Reagan out of it. It’s why Ed Meese, who was guilty, was never prosecuted. It’s
why Joseph diGenova, the independent counsel who looked into the Bush campaign’s
illegal rifling of Clinton’s passport file in 1992, could find clear evidence of
a cover-up conspiracy, and yet still not file charges. Each of those prosecutors
looked at the actions taken and the motives of the people who took them, and
decided it wasn’t worth a national crisis.
But if you’ve been “in 595(c) territory since the spring,” coming to sober
judgments is no longer possible. Starr fairly stalked the president, repeatedly
making the harshest, most aggressive interpretation of every issue that came
before him. Throughout the book, Woodward finds himself writing sentences such as
“Starr found the evidence more conclusive than anyone else in the office” or
“Starr seemed more willing to continue than others on his staff. He was reluctant
to close anything out while there was still a possibility.”
Occasionally, former Watergate chief counsel-cum-independent counsel
“ethicist-for-hire” Sam Dash tries to advise caution. But it’s hard to take him
seriously since he is always threatening to resign. At one point, he’s insisting
he’ll quit if two adverbs and two adjectives he wants don’t show up in the
referral. He keeps rehearsing his resignation, and of course, he finally performs
it, kicking Starr in the teeth the day after his Judiciary Committee appearance.
The only time I felt sorry for Starr was wondering what it must have been like to put
up with this ethical blowhard. Woodward’s index lacks one line, which I offer up
for the paperback:
Dash, Samuel
resignation threatened by, 393, 417, 459, 479, 481
Starr, the old pornographer, comes through loud and clear in the book. We see him
bargaining with Lewinsky’s lawyers about the referral. “I believe we can remove
the reference to genitalia and the to-MA-to,” Starr proffers. And later: “‘I
don’t think we can remove all of the F-words,’ Starr answered prissily.” Starr
would make a great magazine editor.
As they prepared to send the referral to Congress, staffers told Starr it had too
much unnecessary sex. What was the point of proving in painstaking detail what
Clinton had just confessed on national television? But Starr insisted upon an
“encyclopedia” of Clinton’s sexual exploits because “it will show how much work we
did.”
Later, one staffer says, “The narrative shows how pathetic Clinton is, that he
needs therapy, not removal. It’s a sad story. Our job is not to get Clinton out.
It is just to give information.” He pleads with Starr to at least move the sex
narrative from the front of the referral (It’s not about sex, remember?) to a
place behind the more sober perjury arguments. Woodward reports: “Starr rejected
their suggestion. ‘I love the narrative!’ Starr said.”
Well, Bob, I just love that exclamation point!
After the Republicans blew up at Starr for quitting to accept a job at a minor
right-wing law school, the independent counsel returned to the job and now with a
madman’s zeal: “He authorized his prosecutors to pursue lines of inquiry delving
into every aspect of Clinton’s past.”
Woodward describes what was called the “Trooper Project.” Essentially, Starr’s
men interviewed every Arkansas state trooper on a sex-crime fishing expedition,
following closely and suspiciously in the tracks of Paula Jones’ lawyers. These
depositions were taken long before Monica Lewinsky came to light. They
interviewed trooper Roger Perry, among others, exclusively about sex. “All they
wanted to talk about was women,” he said, “They asked if I had ever seen Bill
Clinton perform a sexual act.” Perry told Woodward that they “also wanted to know
if another woman had given birth to Clinton’s child and whether the child looked
like Clinton.”
Woodward went to press on June 25, 1997, with a Washington Post story outlining
the Trooper Project under the headline “Starr Probes Clinton Personal Life.” Then
Woodward explains: “Starr, furious, issued a denial. He claimed he was not
investigating Clinton’s sex life, but merely using ‘well-accepted law enforcement
methods’ to find witnesses associated with Clinton who might know something.”
Apparently, in Starr’s mind, questioning troopers only about Clinton’s sex life
does not constitute “investigating Clinton’s sex life.” I guess it depends on
what your definition of “sex” is.
The other thing that comes across in Woodward’s book about Starr is just how
feeble a prosecutor he was before he lost his mind and decided to play Ahab to
Clinton’s Moby Dick. I did not know that when Robert Fiske was ousted, he had
done all the heavy lifting in preparation for indicting Gov. Jim Guy Tucker
for fraud and of Webster Hubbell for bilking the Rose Law Firm of hundreds of
thousands of dollars — the two prosecutions Starr loves to cite as his great
“achievements.” When Starr first took a deposition from Clinton, Abner Mikva,
who was present, told Woodward, “The questions were mostly trivial” and he
“almost felt sorry for Starr, that the independent counsel should be embarrassed
to be asking the president such questions.”
The only thing Starr did when he took over was to reopen the Vincent Foster
suicide case and then, while complaining bitterly that Clinton was delaying the
Whitewater case, spend three slow years before grudgingly admitting that Hillary Rodham Clinton
had not shot Foster in the head before ordering her flying monkeys to roll him in
a carpet and dump him in the park.
Hypocrisies of this sort litter Woodward’s book. Perhaps the most infuriating one
is Henry Hyde’s. The unindicted home-wrecker who lachrymosed pitifully about his
principled courage in standing up against the flawed will of the people is
revealed to be as ignominious a poll-whore as is Dick Morris.
After it became clear that the Republican mob was going to force an impeachment
vote in the House, he conspired secretly with a liberal friend, Howard Berman, to
try to get a censure resolution before the House so he could have a way out. Why?
Because polls showed that the people who elected him — his
constituents — wanted Clinton out, even though Hyde personally believed
impeachment would be ruinous for the party.
“In my district they want this guy,” Hyde told Berman, “They want this guy’s
head.” So, he asked Berman to try what was dubbed the “Plan of the Four Bobs.”
Berman was to call his friend Bob Strauss, who was to call Bob Michel, who was to
call Bob Dole, who was to call the speaker designate at the time, Bob Livingston,
and get him to force a censure vote.
“Then Livingston will visit me,” Hyde told Berman, “and I won’t put up much of a
fight.” The Plan of the Four Bobs was initiated, but by the time the phone-tag
game got to Dole, rumors of Livingston’s orgy preferences were sweeping the
capital. The plan flopped and Henry “I’m all principle” Hyde pushed through with
impeachment.
The only person who comes through this book with any self-awareness is, oddly,
Clinton. I say that as a proud Clinton-basher (I just bash Starr even more,
because the way he wielded state power was far more dangerous than the way
Clinton waved around his johnson). Clinton knew he was scummy and possessed a
certain brutal honesty about it. “I fucked it up,” he shouts at one point. I’d
say that’s fairly accurate. On the day his videotaped grand jury testimony was
released, the pundits psychobabbled that perhaps Clinton was in a state of
denial. Clinton stomps around his office, roaring, “Goddamn it, I’m not in
denial. I got my ass kicked. There’s no denial here.” That seems about right.
In the end, Woodward notes that Starr could never find a John Dean — an insider
willing to spill the truth — because there wasn’t one. Even as Clinton’s lies
were becoming glaringly obvious, there are these grim scenes of the president
singlehandedly trying to keep aloft his flimsy fiction: He “grasped [Erskine]
Bowles by the right forearm. ‘I’m telling the truth on this,’ Clinton said.”
After Watergate, pundits noted that no White House official would write down
anything. The unwritten code in Washington was to have an unwritten code. By the
time Clinton got to town, it had become too dangerous to even talk to your staff.
So he did it all — had the affair, lied about it, covered it up — all by
himself. He never implicated his own staff in the cover-up because, as Woodward
rather nicely puts it, “the cover-up was a one-man operation.” Is that the real
lesson of Watergate?
The cold, unapproachable Richard Nixon self-destructed by asking all his friends
to lie in order to save him. But Clinton — the flesh-presser, the eternal
campaigner, the leaper out of the limousine into the crowd, the walking Rolodex,
the caller of old pals at 3 a.m.– saved his friends from such a Hobson’s choice
by destroying his presidency, alone.
There’s something self-destructively heroic about Clinton lying to his friends,
as if he didn’t want to hurt their feelings with the truth. It may be the
strangest legacy of all.
With John McCain surging in South Carolina, the state’s Republican Party has been desperately trying to fold up its famous big tent. Party officials admit they have a plan to keep closed nearly one-fourth of the state’s polling places, some 500 of a total 1,778 ballot boxes, for the primary next Saturday. Most of them are in Democratic and black majority areas — as it happens, where McCain’s edge resides.
“In one part of South Carolina, they’ve practically shut down an entire county,” said Rep. Todd Rutherford, a Democratic legislator from Columbia. “Williamburg County — it just happens to be majority black.”
As a result, Rutherford has filed a lawsuit, challenging the practice as a violation of the Voting Rights Act. The two sides are scheduled for a hearing before a three-judge federal panel Monday, five days before the primary Feb. 19. In the meantime, the Republicans have taken their plan before the Justice Department to get a “pre-clearance” opinion, which may pre-empt any judicial consideration.
“The Republicans have come up with a new plan today,” Rutherford said on the telephone Thursday night, explaining the latest maneuvering, “They announced they would shut down 24 percent of black precincts but in a conciliatory effort would also shut down 24 percent of white precincts.” This negotiating position, he said, only exposes that the original plan was to shut down mostly black-majority districts. “That’s why they offered that deal today,” he said, “to make it look good. This is Jim Crow once again.”
Republicans contend that closing down polls is practiced by both camps and that the lawsuit is nothing more than a nuisance filing meant to force the GOP into wasting its state-party money on staffing normally empty precincts. But it’s more complicated than that. The ability to pick and choose which precincts to open is, in fact, a Jim Crow legacy that survives only in presidential primaries in South Carolina. No other state election or primary has this kind of establishment control over the act of voting itself.
And this year in particular, it seems critical. The usually tight control kept on the primary by party officials has gotten away from them. The primary is open, and since Democrats are not holding a primary this year, they are free to crossover and vote in the Republican race. And the primary is on a Saturday instead of the usual Tuesday workday. All these volatile elements have made it easier for McCain’s surge to end in victory and, consequently, have made any standard political fix look like an extraordinary one.
In many ways, this is precisely what happened in New York. The old establishment system of wiring the process for the its hand-picked boy suddenly looked especially corrupt when the other contender ran on the charge that the old establishment system was wiring the process.
“But it is even more curious this year,” said a highly placed figure in the state Democratic Party, referring to the blatant racial slant to the closings, “because they have an African-American candidate, Alan Keyes, running in their primary.”
Rutherford also charges that there are other — shall we say, “antique” — tactics hidden in the Republican poll-closing plan. Even if one wanted to defend consolidating so many precincts, Rutherford said, “the party doesn’t let voters go to the nearest polling place but only the one that the Republican Party decides you should go to.” (Rutherford’s suit draws upon “the data we gathered in the last two primary elections,” he said.)
“For instance, some of the voting districts are large,” he explained. “In my area, district 32 is extremely large. And the Republicans were instructing black voters to go to another black-majority district three districts away when there was a white-majority district right next door. You had to drive through two white-majority precincts to get there.”
In the early part of the last century, a standard good-old-boy trick was to assign blacks voting stations that were a whole day’s walk from their homes. There is a rich history here. South Carolina is one of the few states where the party maintains total control over the presidential primaries. The parties received full electoral power over their primaries during Reconstruction to keep blacks out of, back then, the Democratic primary. When the Supreme Court ruled in 1944 that overt racist discrimination in the primaries was unconstitutional, the state’s demagogues came up with a brilliant idea. They would disentangle the government from party affairs by repealing every single law touching upon the parties, thereby freeing them up to be racist again.
Addressing the legislature, Gov. Olin Johnston declared: “I know that the white Democrats in South Carolina will rally behind you in this matter of repealing all primary laws from the statute books.” He urged this action “to guarantee white supremacy in our primaries” and “to safeguard the homes and happiness of our people.” And so it was done.
The parties maintained ballot-box control over every single primary until 1992, when they ceded the power to administer primaries to a disinterested State Election Commission.
Every primary except one: the presidential primary.
It’s one of the last vestiges of a peculiar history, the dead hand of Jim Crow, reaching up now to salvage George W. Bush’s campaign from a maverick the big-money insiders can’t control.
Given recent developments, Bush’s backers have every reason to be afraid. There is a palpable momentum for McCain in South Carolina, and its sources are of grave concern to the party establishment. Big name Democrats are coming out in support of McCain. Sam Tenenbaum, who chaired just two years ago the inauguration of the sitting Democratic governor, Jim Hodges, and whose own wife works for Gore, admits to giving McCain $1,000.
In South Carolina, the state senate is Democratic and its president, John Drummond, has come out for McCain.
“I’m putting campaign signs in my front yard, I’m sending him campaign contributions, and I’m thrilled that South Carolina is catching fire,” he told the press this week. Then the unaffiliated Reuben Greenberg came out for McCain, which may be the biggest blow. South Carolina doesn’t boast many political celebrities of national stature, but certainly foremost among them is the Jewish African-American police chief in Charleston, who is, it is fair to say, fairly beloved for his stern law-and-order positions.
Meanwhile, the negative campaigning has grown excessive. In both camps, really, but some remarkably egregious tactics conducted by the Bush campaign have been flushed out, especially in the new political art form known as push polling. The practice involves posing as a pollster to ask phony questions loaded often with tendentious and typically false information (“would you support Candidate Blowhard if you learned that he supported gay adoption of orphans?). That’s one thing. But yesterday, McCain produced a 14-year-old boy on his dais to testify that he’d receive a call from a pollster asking if he knew that John McCain was “a cheat, a liar and a fraud.” Now, that’s mud.
Consultants in South Carolina have estimated that a high voter turnout of 400,000 would give McCain the advantage. A turnout of 300,000 would give Bush the benefit he sorely needs. Negative polling historically drives down turnout, so it’s not surprising that the establishment is doing everything it can to ensure that only hard-core Republican voters, whom it can trust to follow orders, get to the polls.
If the new tricks of push polling don’t work, there’s always the old ones: pinpoint McCain’s potential strongholds and close down the polls.
Independent counsel Kenneth Starr lost his last battle on Friday when a federal judge declared a mistrial in the case of Julie Hiatt Steele, the woman Starr indicted for changing her mind and refusing to corroborate Kathleen Willey’s tale of sexual harassment by President Clinton. Steele declared victory in her grudge match with Starr. “I think it’s time to celebrate,” she told reporters outside the courtroom. “It’s time to start my life again.”
Starr’s deputy in the case promised to seek a new trial, but such a move is unlikely. The independent counsel’s office made the same threat after its prosecution of Whitewater figure Susan McDougal ended in mistrial, but it never followed through. Starr may pop up again — prosecuting Webster Hubbell, even trying to torment the Clintons after they leave office. This would not be a good idea. As Julie Hiatt Steele tries to start her life again, it’s time for Ken Starr to do the same. But he’ll likely have a harder time of it.
When Starr appeared before the Governmental Reform Committee in April to denounce the statute that empowered him, he looked scared. If you caught the performance, then you know what Im talking about. There was Americas most repressed pornographer trying to clamp on his furrowed mask of constitutional solemnity, while occasionally flashing his smarmiest hey-little-girl-would-you-like-to-make-a-nickel smile. But then youd see it flash by, momentarily: the flaring eyes, the involuntary mammalian expression of absolute fear.
And why shouldnt he be scared? Starr knows perhaps better than anyone that nothing — but history — awaits him now. He knows that the bell will toll, and its gonna toll for him. You can almost feel it, the one part to this story that has yet be carried out. Its why Starr is clinging to his office. He is desperately devising an exit strategy that wont entail his own persecution. But its ineluctable. Im not talking about a legal matter or some ethical situation. More than anything this is an historical imperative.
Wherever Whitewater began, it ended not as malfeasance, not as politics, not as sex, not as perjury, but as a classic American morality play between absolutists and humanists, between people who believe that every last speck of sin must be cleansed from our souls and people who understand that we must live with an unsquarable degree of venality in our lives.
Its the battle between the Puritans who knew there was only one right way, and the Quakers who believed that different people could find virtue by unlike paths. Its the battle between those who believe forgiveness is something only God dispenses, and those who believe that humans ennoble themselves by granting it to one another — between those who crave the law and those who look to the quality of mercy. Its the battle between Joseph McCarthy, who insisted upon destroying even the lamest screenwriter who had swaggered in his youth by signing up as a “communist,” and those who saw blacklisting as the extermination of the weak. Between those who believed that every last witch must be driven from Salem and those who saw witchhunting for what it was.
Ill bet Ken Starr knows the fate of Salem’s Rev. Samuel Parris. After the witch trials ended, his congregation fired him. He spent the rest of life wandering the earth wearing the rent garments of a common merchant. And Joseph McCarthy? After Fred Friendly showed him on CBS television laughing his gappy teeth at the suffering of the powerless and picking his nose with his thick buttery fingers, he was censured by his own Senate. McCarthy withdrew to Wisconsin, to stew upon his abandonment and to watch his name slip into the dictionaries as a monstrous adjective. He died a drunk.
Ken Starr has good reason to be scared.
Starrs humiliation has already begun. He was once one of the most-respected conservative judges in the country, a man on par with Richard Posner or Charles Fried. Like anyone in that position, he longed for his seat on the Supreme Court — now as out of reach as the moon. He must retreat to the embrace of the extremists, whom he has so artlessly served as proxy these past five $50 million years. There hell join the lineup of Robert Bork, Oliver North and William Bennett on the rubber-chicken moral-crank circuit, entertaining Holiday Inns full of angry federalists with tales of his quixotic derring-do and his exquisite virtue.
A pretty unpleasant curse, but its only the beginning. Looking ahead, three other ordeals await Ken Starr.
The first is water torture. All of his current cases have sputtered — Susan McDougal, Julie Hiatt Steele (not to mention President Clinton’s impeachment acquittal). Given Starrs overreaching tendencies, it already appears that almost any old 12 folks you pick are ready for some good ol fashioned American jury nullification. Hardly a news cycle spins round that some press item doesn’t appear that must torment Starr like a hot poker. The press hooted contemptuously when it was learned that Steeles daughters boyfriend was asked in the grand jury whether hed had sex with her.
When Steele flew to Little Rock last month to testify on behalf of McDougal, these two Whitewater supernumeraries snuggled arm and waist and sashayed across Capitol Avenue in a sassy perp walk that had the papparazzi moaning with indecent pleasure. After McDougal was acquitted of one of Starrs charges, she publicly dined on canteloupes and strawberries while draining flutes of Taittinger. The girl gloats as menacingly as Bette Davis. In a stage whisper, she confided to her fiance about what was next: “Our options are just worldwide, aren’t they, dear?” Her lawyer added: “The office of independent counsel is full of more crap than a Christmas goose.” More Taittinger!
These little pearls roll out of the papers about once a week. You can’t stop reading.
The second torture for Starr may come at the hands of Janet Reno, who could still fire him. Her investigation is still underway, but more importantly, so is Judge Norma Holloways. If the judge, who ruled so often in Starrs favor, determines that the independent counsels office violated the law by leaking, then Reno would have clear and wide ethical room to give Starr the heave-ho. The added element of suffering then would be the widespread indifference from editorial pages all over the world — all except the Wall Street Journal which (I predict here) will keen and howl, make the inevitable comparison to the Saturday Night Massacre, and then call impotently for an investigation of the investigation. Those of us who delight in reading the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal will listen carefully for something that sounds like a spoon banging furiously on a high chair.
The last method of torture will be next years election. Republicans are desperately trying to get American minds off the impeachment proceedings (and so is Clinton). Even though Starr is not cooperating by dragging out these last irrelevant prosecutions, Republican consultants swear that American memories are short. Well see.
The impeachment scandal tarnished everyone who caused it. On the Democratic side, that would be: President Clinton. On the Republican side that would be: The United States House of Representatives. I suspect the vote to impeach will come back to haunt the majority that brought this show trial to the American public. Why? Because no one in Washington has yet acknowledged the only group that wielded the enormous constitutional power given it soberly and fairly — the real judge in the impeachment matter.
That would not be Ken Starr, who was more a glorified detective. The House served hastily as prosecutors and the Senate perfunctorily as jurors. The judge was not William Rehnquist, who never rose above his role as functionary to the House parliamentarian. The judge was the collective will of the American voter, we the people.
Time and again, the William Bennetts and Rush Limbaughs of the world trashed the voters judgment with the charge that the people just didnt care about the rule of law. That they were morally reckless. That they were not paying attention. But as every television-ratings survey revealed, they were extremely tuned in. They long ago rendered a judgment. It was not sloppy nor apathetic nor immoral. But rather nuanced, actually. They understood that Clinton unctuously skirted the law and that he lied to them. They also recognized the basic unfairness of Starrs unaffiliated army of dirt devils and the greater danger to personal freedom of Starrs casual use of RICO-like anti-mob tactics to track down and corner one individual, even if that person was the president.
So they reached their judgment, first by humbling Bill Clinton. The American voter could have short-circuited the impeachment process, had a million people shown up on the Washington mall last December. The House vote might have gone the other way; the Senate certainly would have cut short the trial. But Clinton has few loyalists among American voters willing to do such things. So they let it happen: They let Congress humiliate Clinton. Mister president, American voters call their leader. And nothing more.
And Congress? Have you noticed how they tremble a bit these days, that tremolo in their voices? The politicians tried to boast that they defied the polls. But it was with all the braggadocio of school children whistling past a graveyard. Those polls didnt change after the first day or after the first week. Month after month they stayed the same, then year after year. The last election ratified their meaning. These were not polls. They were never polls. Taken together, unchanged over time, this was the will of the American people, fully informed, casting judgment — precisely what the Constitution grants them the liberty to do, requires them to do.
The American voter has reminded the custodians of our institutions exactly to whom they owe their prestige. Think about how puny the Congress and the president seem these days standing in the shade of the electorate’s unaltered and infallible judgment. They have punished Clinton, but granted him mercy if only to frustrate the stomping fury of congressional Rumpelstiltskins. When George Bush lost the election in 1992, he gracefully replied, “The majesty of the American voter has spoken, and I respect their decision.” Well, I suspect theyll be speaking again soon enough.
And what they will say will be another reminder that the sovereign in this country is not our greaser president, not the cross-eyed managers, not the frothing prosecutor, and not the excitable media. All of them are supernumeraries in this democracy.
The man whose name will forever attach itself to this lesson is Ken Starr. And, if Congress, after only three terms of Republican leadership, becomes Democratic next November — can any devil in hell imagine a more bitter end than to be the single man who herded the Republicans back into the wilderness of being a minority party?
No matter, the story will finally come to an end. And regardless of how many times Mrs. Starr tells interviewers about the pleasure of hearing her husband recite the lyrics of hymns, the rest of the country will be telling another story. Summed up, it will go like this: Once upon a time, there was a man named Ken Starr. He was very powerful and everybody was afraid of him, but he was defeated. Now he wanders in the wilderness, alone.
Why did President Clinton wear that necktie? I’m referring to the $100 silk Zegna
in audacious gold-and-navy patterns that Monica gave him with the remark, “When
I see you wearing this tie, I’ll know I’m close to your heart.” Clinton donned it for a
gun-ban rally in the Rose Garden the very morning Monica was testifying before
the grand jury. The New York Times suspected that it was “a plea for solidarity,”
while Newsday thought it was a White House threat to Lewinsky “that she was
being watched.”
But there was something off in the timing. “Ms. Lewinsky did not learn of Mr.
Clinton’s choice of neckties until she turned on the television that evening,” the
Times noted.
Now, any two-bit G-7 knows that Clinton would have had to wear the tie the day
before so that she would see it on the evening news prior to her testimony.
Certainly Clinton, of all people, would have known such media fundamentals. So
think like Sherlock Holmes for a minute. If it wasn’t witness-tampering or a threat,
then what was Clinton signaling?
I was on my third day of noodling this riddle (along with a few others I will get to
shortly) while strolling to a friend’s birthday party in Central Park when I looked up
to see Woody Allen’s familiar building. Woody and Soon Yi, Bill and Monica. Could
it be? What if it wasn’t just meaningless sex by a groupie eager to try out her
presidential kneepads? What if Bill and Monica were actually in love?
Stay with me here, because if you suspend the belief that everything Clinton says
is a lie, then a good number of mysteries disappear, patterns surface and a
coherent theory emerges.
What if Clinton wore the tie for no reason other than to communicate to Monica,
after the ordeal of testifying, that “I’m close to your heart”? Impossible? Does it
help to know that Clinton also wore the Zegna when he left Washington for his
historic trip to China, and on the day of his return — two occasions with major
television exposure for coded “I love you, Monica” messages? Bill and Monica
seemed to have a thing for secret signals. One source alleges the infamous beret
was a gift from Clinton. Now what better way to send a message to Dreamboat
amid a massively attended White House function? And how about the “Romeo
and Juliet” ad placed in the Washington Post on Valentine’s Day by Monica?
Assuming that Clinton wasn’t looking for a dishwasher’s job or wasn’t out to buy a used
El Camino, why would he be cruising the classifieds unless it had been
pre-arranged by the two of them? (Watergate buffs will note that the Washington
Post was the preferred medium of the ur-Deep Throat.)
How about this one: Last winter, just before the scandal broke, Linda Tripp set up
a trap for Clinton when she told the Paula Jones lawyers that the president had
given Lewinsky gifts. So a Dec. 19 subpoena served on Lewinsky commanded
her to hand over “each and every gift including, but not limited to, any and all
dresses, accessories, and jewelry, and/or hat pins given to you by, or on behalf of,
Defendant Clinton.” Almost immediately, there’s the whole business of Betty
Currie and the retrieval of the gifts.
But nine days later, on Dec. 28, upon the first opportunity for Bill and Monica to
have a Christmas date (and their last meeting face to face, or whatever), Clinton
gives her more presents. A bunch more. He gives her a throw rug, a gold brooch
and an Alaskan stone carving of a bear. You can muse on the hidden meaning of
such a troika of gifts on your own time, but consider this: Is there anything more
domestic than a throw rug. A throw rug, for Christ’s sake. I don’t even know where
to begin with that. A gold brooch is an intimate gift, but it’s not as overtly sexual as,
say, earrings (piercing the flesh) or a necklace (embracing the body). A gold
brooch suggests sexual intimacy, as any piece of jewelry does, but with the
implication of a mature future. And a bear carving? I’m betting that one day we will
learn of a certain ursine nickname Monica once employed for the First Stud.
But to get back to the problem. Why would OIC-savvy President Clinton risk giving
even more presents to Monica? As a Clinton insider told the Washington Post, it
just didn’t make any sense from a Machiavellian point of view: “The moral of the
story is, if he was orchestrating an obstruction campaign, why was he giving her
gifts on the 28th?”
Perhaps the simple answer is that this was a guy who loved his gal. It’s a hard
concept, admittedly, to wrap one’s mind around since such a plain and boyish
explanation flies in the face of Clinton’s conniving reputation for “using everybody.”
(A preposterous accusation, by the way, since presidents are Darwinianly
selected for such behavior. Reagan, Nixon, Kennedy, Roosevelt — famous users
all.) Of course the rashness of the Christmas presents is nothing compared to the
insanity of the entire affair. It was initiated after the Paula Jones lawsuit was
green-lighted. Hubris? Or maybe enchantment.
The full list of presents, as it has accumulated from leaks out of the grand jury,
holds other clues. Consider the joke sunglasses. That’s right, one of the presents
Monica received from the Leader of the Free World was a pair of joke sunglasses.
Silly, goofy, sure. But just who do we feel most comfortable being silly and goofy
with? Here, visualize this: Clinton giving joke sunglasses to Hillary. Hard to bring
that little mind picture into focus, isn’t it?
Clinton gave Monica a “souvenir from Radio City Music Hall” when he was there to
celebrate his 50th birthday party. So he’s giving her presents from milestone
events in his life, thus suggesting that, for him, she participates in them. He
shares with Monica the solemnity of his office (a signed copy of a State of the
Union address) but also gives her something hinting of future vacations (a
Martha’s Vineyard Black Dog bag). One gift was as romantically straightforward as
it gets: a box of chocolates.
Then there are the books, which hint of a deep but spiritual kind of Eros between
them. Clinton gave Monica “Leaves of Grass.” Let’s just put aside the easy fellatrix
jokes (“I Sing the Body Electric”) and think about what this particular book means
to a man of Clinton’s generation. Metaphorically, it’s about the beauty of rollicking
carnality when it yearns to defy death, a book that signifies the elevation of
old-fashioned lusty monkey-love as a plaintive reach toward immortality. For a
liberal-arts dilettante like Clinton, “Leaves of Grass” is the book that yokes the
sacred and the profane into meaningful union. It’s what you give your lover before
you move on to a Henry Miller novel or James Joyce’s letters to Nora from the
winter of 1909.
And what is the book Monica gave Bill — Nicholson Baker’s phone-sex tour de
force “Vox” — but a Gen X attempt at signaling the same complex of spiritual
longings bound up in physical desire? Yet, the differences are interesting.
“Leaves” is hopeful, even defiant, while “Vox” has an almost tragic quality to it, an
acknowledgment that the real world will never allow the couple’s profanity to
bloom into holiness. The book ends with the woman hanging up the phone
because “I have to put a load of towels in the laundry.” (Knowing now of the
DNA-stained dress, one wonders if Monica ever finished the book.)
According to the usual sources (Monica’s “friends”), she and the president actually
participated in some phone sex. Given the intimacy of the gifts, this revelation is
significant. By and large, phone sex happens between absolute strangers or
serious lovers. You don’t have phone sex with a friend or even a groupie. Among
committed lovers, phone sex is the foundation of something deeper and
meaningful. One doesn’t whisper one’s own degrading but arousing fantasies to
anyone except someone you trust and love — and love passionately.
If you accept this, then it becomes even clearer why Hillary has decided to stand
and fight. She, perhaps alone except for Monica, realizes what is really at stake
here. Her marriage.
- – - – - – - – - -
Then there are the other clues. Clinton apparently left messages on Monica’s
answering machine — a deeply risky thing to do. Such messages can be
preserved or overheard (as perhaps they were — recorded by Linda Tripp, who
had Monica play them over the telephone to her). The sheer madness of leaving
icky-poo messages suggests a kind of puppy-love giddiness. I have had friends
describe such details and then rant in disgust: “He’s acting like a teenager
stricken by first love.” Exactly. (The incredulity may soon end. This week, after Linda Tripp’s agent, Lucianne Goldberg, leaked some
of Clinton’s humiliating love-whispers to Monica, the “true-love” scenario
made it into the pages of the National Enquirer, which, let’s be honest, is
the real newspaper of record nowadays.)
It’s this adolescent quality of the affair that leaves Clinton defenders almost
breathless. The unthinkable romance — youthfully indiscreet, reckless and
passionate. He’s the president, Democrats howl in private, why couldn’t he keep it
zipped for his eight years?
Why? Because the American public has misunderstood the critical key to Clinton’s
character from the beginning. He has been repeatedly interpreted as a
baby-boomer politician, a New Democrat, a child of alcoholics — all of which miss
the critical factor in Clinton’s psychological development. He is a Southern White
Male. As am I, so let me clue you in: If you really want to peel the onion of Clinton’s
psyche, you must eventually hunker down with the Bible of Southern Studies, W.J.
Cash’s “The Mind of the South.”
It was Cash who, for the first time in American literary history, explored the
deepest impulses of all those who preceded Clinton and all those who will come
after. (Cash published the book in 1941 and then, horrified at the profound truths
he had unearthed for the delectation of cackling Yankees, hanged himself with his
necktie from the door of a Mexican hotel.)
From Day 1, every Southerner contends with the vestigial pillars of Dixie Chivalry,
one of these being the Cult of Southern Womanhood, or, in Cash’s lovely
neologism, “gyneolatry.” The result was the highly stylized figurine on a pedestal
famously known as the Southern Belle. As a statue, she was perfect; as a wife,
she was thoroughly desexualized, resembling more a mother than a lover. The
curse of every Southern boy is the feeling that he must marry the proper (but
boring) girl. From birth on, the notion of goodness and sexiness are cleaved. (It’s
also why Southern racism has about it the fury of sexuality denied: Because the
good belle has been drained of sexuality, the natural vessel to contain animal
passion is negritude, or if miscegenation is unthinkable, white trashiness.) As a
result, “many Southerners,” Cash wrote 50 years before Clinton slinked into the
side chamber of his Oval Office, “find positive pleasure in the furtive itself [and]
require secrecy and the guilty sense of sin as necessary conditions of the highest
zest.”
Clinton probably thought he had escaped the traditional Southern curse of
marrying a well-behaved belle, but the fact is he just married the liberal
simulacrum of a belle: a completely desexualized feminist. Thus, Clinton is
irresistibly drawn to a woman who in his mind embodies the animal passions –
not a well-bred (or well-educated) female with a proper hairdo, trim, shapeless
bosom and modest callipygian tush. But a woman who trumpets her sexuality
with big hair, crimson lipstick, great Willendorfian titties and a high-water booty.
Yet all Southerners are incurable romantics, Cash says, battered by “the two
currents of Puritanism and hedonism.” Thus, it’s not that Clinton merely wants
some hot sweaty romping with a little cigar diddling thrown in. He also longs for it
to mean something. It may shock the rest of the country but it will come as no
surprise to his co-regionalists that Clinton might fall desperately in love with the
young zaftig woman who gave him his first glimpse of post-presidential passion –
after 30 years of doing precisely what he was supposed to do, marrying the right
woman, containing (as best he could) all of his desires, holding in check
everything that might jeopardize the steep ramp of his career path.
Most of the media and public have expressed near revulsion for Monica because
she connived her way into his office, quoted “Romeo and Juliet” in her Valentine
ad, called him the Big Creep — i.e., treated the president as if he were a
high-school boyfriend. Maureen Dowd recently vented yet another variation of her
weekly Monica abuse that honked at the girl’s adolescent stalking of the president
and expressed contempt that Monica presumed she and the president of the
United States had “a future together.”
But everything that Monica did, Bill did. He left messages on her machines,
recklessly gave her gifts, sent her coded signals, said that they had a future
together after he left the White House (even fantasizing aloud about having a
longed-for son with her, according to one account). Maybe he was stalking her too.
Maybe this was a two-way stalking, or in the plain language that Al Gore wants
Americans to reclaim, we might just call it love.
