During the four-and-a-half-year Whitewater probe of the Clinton administration, dozens of innocent individuals and entities have been swept up into independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s and congressional Republicans’ investigative machinery — only to emerge with tarnished reputations, huge legal bills and the inability to do anything about their predicament.
Nowhere have so many people been tainted as in Little Rock, the close-knit Arkansas state capital, where subpoenas, depositions, indictments, convictions — and acquittals — have touched hundreds of lives.
One institution left reeling from a multitude of media and congressional allegations is the once-venerable Rose Law Firm, where Hillary Rodham Clinton used to practice law. Three of her partners, Vincent Foster, William Kennedy III and Webster Hubbell, joined the Clintons in Washington after their 1992 victory, but only Kennedy, who was Foster’s associate White House counsel, escaped back to Little Rock — and the firm — with comparatively minimal damage.
The Rose firm itself was accused of having a conflict of interest between its (and Hillary Clinton’s) representation of Jim McDougal’s Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan and the firm’s later representation of the U.S. government against Madison’s auditor. It was also accused, falsely, of having “shredded” Madison and Whitewater documents — a story that led the national news shows when broken in 1994 by the conservative Washington Times newspaper.
The Rose firm was again falsely implicated when Hillary Clinton’s infamous “missing” billing records turned up in the White House in January 1996, two years after they were subpoenaed.
And while an independent investigation into all the Rose charges eventually determined there was virtually no substance to them, the firm — the oldest west of the Mississippi River, established in 1820 — has been seriously, and permanently, damaged.
One charge frequently leveled by Clinton detractors is that the White House is continually putting roadblocks in the way of Starr’s investigation. At the top of this list are the missing Rose firm billing records of Hillary Clinton’s 60 hours of work over 15 months for McDougal, which had been removed from firm files in order to answer New York Times reporter Jeff Gerth’s questions in March 1992, during the presidential campaign.
Ignored by the media and Clinton critics is the fact that when they did surface, the records substantiated Hillary Clinton’s public and sworn statements.
Sworn testimony given in deposition by both President Clinton’s personal lawyer, David Kendall, and White House Special Counsel Jane Sherburne, who were the first to question White House secretary Carolyn Huber after she located the records, tells a largely unreported story.
Sherburne, who was hired in January 1995 from the Washington law firm Wilmer Cutler & Pickering to manage the response to all Whitewater investigations, says that Huber was at first “very unsure about when or where she had found the records in the book room,” a catch-all storage room in the family quarters of the White House. When Huber later testified, her story had become “precise,” says Sherburne. She surmises that Huber, a former Rose Law Firm secretary, “had packed them up in the governor’s mansion in Little Rock before the Clintons moved to Washington.”
All the Clintons’ boxes were stored elsewhere, says Sherburne, and then brought, a few at a time, to the book room, where Huber unpacked them and determined what should be done with the contents.
“But in the rush to clear out the book room in 1995 to make office space for the people who were going to help Mrs. Clinton write her book, ["It Takes a Village"], Carolyn probably threw the billing records she had unpacked into a box along with the old shoes and empty hangers that were also in the box, and moved it to her office to deal with later.”
So much for the “mystery.”
In Starr’s search for records, Sherburne also had the distasteful task of complying with Starr’s threat to search the Clintons’ living quarters for a mysterious box described to her as having the name “Foster” on it.
“They wouldn’t give me a clue as to what size it was supposed to be,” Sherburne said. She was told that FBI agents would do the search. “‘Are you out of your minds?’ she says she told them. “FBI agents searching the president’s private living quarters?” After negotiations, Starr’s staff told her they would trust her to do it, accompanied by the White House head usher. Sherburne asked another lawyer to join her also.
Hillary Clinton’s reaction to the search? “‘Just get in here and do it,’” says Sherburne. “Her attitude by then was, ‘It’s another indignity I have to endure, and I’m not going to waste any energy getting upset about it.” There have been reports that the search included the Clintons’ underwear and lingerie drawers — Chelsea’s too. “The whole thing was so offensive to me that I don’t want to confirm or deny that,” says Sherburne, but Salon’s interview with Sherburne left no doubt that she had indeed searched the Clintons’ underwear drawers, and every other nook and cranny of the family’s living quarters. “It took several hours. It was thorough,” she says. “And it did not turn up a box with Vincent Foster’s name on it.”
The constant stream of charges against Hillary Clinton and her partners besmirched the reputation of the Rose firm, which until then had been the premier firm in Arkansas. Rose’s reputation “was tarnished — for the most part wrongly and unfairly and in ways that can never be undone,” writes reporter Terry Carter in the July issue of the American Bar Association Journal. “The Rose Law Firm got a bum rap” and came under relentless scrutiny that “probably few could survive.” His article chronicles Rose’s descent into the maelstrom and its efforts to recover from the charges and slurs hurled at it.
Carter blames “an unholy alliance of congressional members and staff, special interest groups and the news media,” but except for Webster Hubbell’s conviction for overbilling — which the firm itself, not Starr — uncovered, “sensational allegations of wrongdoing at the firm have proved untrue, and that has gone unreported.”
The firm was left to pick up the pieces and move ahead, without what had been the expected return of Foster, whom, Carter says, many Rose attorneys regarded “as the soul of the firm.” Nine Rose lawyers have left to form their own firm, taking its most lucrative practice in securities with them.
Leading Rose today is Ronald M. Clark, who as the firm’s point man during the years of investigations was badgered by the press and by the Republicans on the Senate Whitewater Committee, particularly Chairman Alfonse D’Amato, R-N.Y. When the FDIC reported in spring 1994 that the Rose firm had no serious conflicts of interest in the Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan work, “D’Amato was furious,” according to Carter, and he ordered a re-investigation.
Under the more compliant Resolution Trust Corporation, the re-investigation was turned over to the Washington office of Pillsbury Madison & Sutro, and the RTC specifically designated Jay Stephens as the lead attorney. Stephens, President George Bush’s appointee to the office of U.S. attorney in the District of Columbia, had just been fired by President Clinton, as had all 90 U.S. attorneys, which is customary when the opposing party wins the White House.
In addition, Stephens had publicly and personally criticized President Clinton and had considered challenging for Democratic Virginia Sen. Chuck Robb’s seat in 1994 (as had Starr). Clintonites and Democrats complained loudly about Stephens’ partisanship, and Pillsbury later put the investigation into the hands of two other Pillsbury attorneys.
Pillsbury vastly widened the investigation to include all of Rose’s work on 38 savings and loans for the RTC and FDIC in the S&L “bailout” of the late 1980s and early ’90s. Like hundreds of law firms nationwide, Hubbell and Foster at Rose sought and received some of the massive amount of legal work the government was contracting out.
Then, in a stunning reversal of government policy, many of these same firms were later themselves aggressively audited and sued. But Pillsbury reported in 1995 that it still hadn’t found “substantial problems with Rose’s work.” Indeed, in 1994, Ira Parker, the RTC’s associate general counsel, told this Salon reporter, “I chose the Rose Law Firm to do the work because they were the best firm in Arkansas.”
But D’Amato also found that exoneration unacceptable, and ordered Pillsbury back to work, the edict being “to find wrongdoing,” says Carter. Pillsbury, he says, then found a few “impermissible conflicts” that were inevitable “in a small state with only so many lawyers capable of handling big matters.” The RTC demanded a return of $300,000, and Rose finally settled (as have many law firms to avoid lengthy and even more costly litigation with the government and its bottomless pockets) for $210,000.
Ron Clark observed: “They didn’t find one thing wrong with Foster’s bills.” And Pillsbury’s final 1996 report noted, regarding Rose’s work for Madison Guaranty: “It simply would not be persuasive to argue that, for $21,000 [in legal fees over several years], McDougal corrupted the Rose Law Firm and convinced half a dozen lawyers, most of whom he did not know, to join him in a scheme to violate the law … The conspiracy theory is hopelessly flawed.”
Jay Stephens refused to review and sign off on his firm’s report, despite having billed the government $68,000 for what he called his “minimal” work. Republicans had labeled Hillary Clinton’s work for Madison “substantial,” when, in fact, she had realized only about $300 from her work for Madison and McDougal.
The Pillsbury report also addressed the widely reported canard that the Rose Law Firm had “shredded” Madison Guaranty and Whitewater-related documents. Pillsbury said that any discarding of those documents was done “in a seemingly innocent context of routine purging of files.”
It turned out that a college student who had worked as a courier for Rose had leaked the shredding story to the Washington Times. He later advertised in the American Spectator that he had samples of shredded Whitewater paper to sell, although the actual documents shredded had nothing to do with Whitewater, says Carter.
Today, determined to rebound, Rose has instituted a tighter management system under Clark and changed its compensation system. “How many firms in America could withstand what we withstood and survive?” Clark asked in his interview with Carter. Not counting the hours spent on complying with congressional demands, Rose’s legal bills exceeded $1 million.
After several grillings before the Senate Whitewater Committee, D’Amato offered a left-handed apology to Clark and the Rose firm, perhaps inspired by the senator’s own approval ratings, which had dropped below 30 percent. D’Amato acknowledged that “witnesses such as Clark may find themselves in positions which are unfair,” and that he believed Clark “attempted to answer the questions to the absolute best” of his recollection, had not “withheld anything” and “answered in all candor … We have a duty to try to set that record straight and indicate that.”
That exchange, however, was not reported in any publication — not the New York Times, the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Arkansas Democrat-Gazette nor the Washington Times, which broke the discredited shredding story.
But then, the Whitewater story has always been much more a media story than an actual criminal case, anyway. The Whitewater story is actually a breakdown in American journalism of historic proportions, as some of the country’s leading media outlets failed to understand — and accurately report — the complexities of a political witch hunt.
Did you ever wonder why so many conservatives seem to hate President Clinton so much? After all, this is a president often described (and derided) as a crypto-conservative, a Republicrat, an opportunist who has betrayed the ancient precepts of Democratic liberalism. Superficial as they may be, those epithets contain enough truth that Clinton ought to bemuse Republicans more than enrage them. But enrage them he does, not because of his sundry alleged scandals or even because he kicked Republican butt in two consecutive elections.
Actually, whether they realize it or not, right-wingers hate Clinton because they fear him. As the more candid conservatives have confessed, they’re frightened by his political skills, although that isn’t what scares them most. What truly spooks Clinton’s enemies is watching him reanimate a Democratic Party they quite reasonably had pronounced dead, or at least brain-dead.
After years of infuriating his party’s various tribes while campaigning and governing, Clinton is consciously attempting to create a new Democratic consensus. Perhaps it is meant to be his presidential legacy to the party he has mostly ignored. He did begin this project during his first national campaign, then abandoned it amid the chaos and disappointment of his first term. Although he contrived to disarm the Republicans of their favorite racial “wedge issues” of crime and welfare, he failed to put across an appealing alternative program. Now, against the Democratic propensity for ideological feuding and weepy nostalgia, Clinton is promoting a modernized party of the center-left, prepared to compete politically without abandoning progressive values. Should he succeed, he will have strengthened the party he has been accused of destroying — at a time when it is Republicans who suffer from militant factions and stale ideas.
According to Sidney Blumenthal, the presidential aide who is trying to bring together liberal and moderate Democrats, what his boss seeks is a “Third Way” between traditional social democracy and free-market liberalism. It is an outlook he shares most closely with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and also with leaders of governing socialist parties in France and Italy as well as the party favored to win power in Germany’s next election. The latest sign of ideological renovation in the White House was a conference last week that included more than a dozen longtime adversaries from the party’s right and left wings. Hosted by Hillary Rodham Clinton, leading intellectuals from the Democratic Leadership Council (market-oriented liberal) and the Economic Policy Institute (labor-affiliated social democrat), as well as other groups, took a refreshing break from mutual polemics. They spoke cordially and even discovered agreement on a few matters of national interest. Any such attempt at concord would have been doomed before Clinton, for better or worse, sold off some Democratic heirlooms. His balanced budget, anti-crime program and welfare cutbacks may still provoke anger on the left, but they seem to have won acceptance if not enthusiasm among liberal African-Americans and women, where his popularity remains high. Yet those mass constituencies — without whom the Democratic Leadership Council is nothing but a group of talking heads — cannot be mobilized without a positive message.
What might that message be, if Democrats could agree? David Osborne, the author of “Reinventing Government” and a consultant of “new Democrat” persuasion, foresees possible unity around a platform of universal educational opportunity and job-creating public investment. Democrats of all stripes, unlike Republicans, “believe deeply in government,” he says. They may argue loudly about how to manage public services and what to privatize, but such arguments sound academic when the Republicans talk about dismantling and destroying services and institutions. And while Osborne expects continuing dissension over trade, an issue that has alienated Clinton from congressional Democrats, he perceives “a lot of potential for compromise” regarding environmental and labor protections. “What you are seeing in the Western industrialized countries,” he says, “are liberal and social democratic parties adjusting to the realities of the global marketplace.”
But can Democrats make that adjustment to the future while honoring their past commitments to society’s most vulnerable, those excluded from the worldwide bazaar in goods and services? Pessimists will point to Clinton’s welfare bill, insisting that only an unusually strong expansion has prevented catastrophic decline in the living standards of the poor. Optimists will reply that Clinton’s increases in the minimum wage and the earned income tax credit have helped lift millions out of poverty during the current cycle. The most important test will be the revision of Social Security, setting advocates of private investment against defenders of public entitlements. If Democrats somehow can avoid a wrenching split over this question within their own ranks, they may be able to prevent wholesale privatization by the Republicans, and a subsequent return to widespread poverty among the elderly. Of course, that means displeasing the drooling Wall Street Democrats who provide much of the money that keeps the Democratic Leadership Council — and the Democratic Party — in business.
The process the Clintons launched is embryonic and fragile. An afternoon of chat among Beltway intellectuals is only the very beginning of real negotiation between rival interest groups. But achieving a rough consensus on issues that have bitterly divided the Democratic Party would revive the possibility of a progressive majority in American politics. First it would mean getting rid of at least one long-cherished ritual: the circular firing squad. The Republicans seem to be adopting that formation as their own these days, anyway.
Have you ever heard of Larry Klayman? If you read last week’s Newsweek, you’d learn that he has sued his own mother. If you are a reader of Salon, you would know that he recently subpoenaed two of its reporters. And if you’ve followed any of the Clinton scandal coverage of the past months, you’ve probably seen him holding forth on TV or quoted in the papers.
Klayman is the chairman and general counsel of Judicial Watch, a conservative “watchdog” group that has had an amazing knack for insinuating itself into the investigations of numerous White House scandals. Klayman’s suit against the Commerce Department in connection with alleged campaign finance irregularities, for instance, has allowed him to depose numerous Clinton administration officials.
In addition, Klayman filed a multimillion-dollar class action civil suit against first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, the White House and the FBI, among others, on behalf of former Reagan and Bush employees whose FBI files were found at the White House. (In connection with that suit, he recently subpoenaed two Salon reporters, along with their notes and records. Klayman has since put the subpoenas on hold, although he is continuing with a similar subpoena against reporter Jane Mayer of the New Yorker.)
Klayman calls himself “a conservative Ralph Nader,” but television viewers perhaps know him best as a fixture on the political chat-show circuit, with his appearances on shows such as “Crossfire,” “Internight,” “Rivera Live,” “Talkback Live,” “PrimeTime Live,” “Charles Grodin,” “Inside Politics,” “Equal Time” and “The Big Show.” Given his ubiquitous presence and reasonable demeanor, you might not realize that Klayman is also a peddler of some of the most outlandish accusations made against the Clinton administration.
Take the case of the late Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, who died in April 1996 when the Air Force jet he was flying in crashed in the mountains of Croatia. Klayman doesn’t find that explanation convincing. While careful never to level a direct accusation, Klayman has floated the theory that Brown may actually have been murdered to keep him quiet about the White House’s alleged campaign-finance shenanigans.
In fact, Klayman has petitioned a federal three-judge panel that appoints independent counsels to order not only an investigation into Brown’s death but also into the death of another Commerce Department employee, Barbara Wise. According to Klayman, Wise “worked in the same section” as the notorious Democratic Party fund-raiser John Huang and died under suspicious circumstances in her Commerce Department office. (The Commerce Department says that Wise — who was found dead in her office on Nov. 29, 1996 — died from natural causes.)
It’s not as if Klayman’s “unconventional” views are hidden from public view. Far from it. All the examples I’ve described in this article are conveniently posted in press releases and legal pleadings at the Judicial Watch Web site. And when I spoke to Klayman late last month he was more than happy to walk me through what he regards as evidence that there was more to Brown’s death than met the eye.
In Klayman’s version of events, there had been an uneasy confrontation between Brown and Clinton when he told the president that he would tell all unless Clinton shut down the independent counsel’s investigation of the commerce secretary. Then Brown was unexpectedly asked to travel to Croatia. Klayman contends that Brown’s body was in “near-perfect condition” after the crash — except for a mysterious hole found in Brown’s skull, which Klayman says may have been a gunshot wound from a .45 caliber pistol. Indicative of a possible cover-up, says Klayman, is the fact that no autopsy was performed. (For the record, the initial examination of Brown’s body concluded that he — along with the other 34 passengers — died from the impact of the crash; a follow-up internal military review confirmed that conclusion.)
Klayman is suspicious. He told me that he is currently pursuing a Freedom of Information Act request for government documents that he believes will show that there may have been multiple survivors of the crash. “He [Brown] could have been one of those survivors,” Klayman told me. Suggesting that some people were sent to finish the job, Klayman adds: “Then the issue arises: Was he shot on the ground?”
Perhaps the bigger mystery is why viewers of the Clinton-scandal talk shows aren’t given a better idea of who they are listening to. Few of the producers I spoke with were eager to talk about it. Three separate producers at MSNBC’s “Internight” and “The Big Show,” for instance, declined comment. After all, as one producer for “The Big Show” told me, “We’ve only had him on once.”
Rick Davis, the senior executive producer of “Crossfire,” was more forthcoming. “If we made points or clarifications about every guest on the show,” Davis told me, “we’d get in the way of the 22 minutes of debate.” Davis reasons that “Crossfire” is an adversarial environment. Every guest faces hostile questioning from one of the hosts or the guests, and viewers can make up their minds about who is credible and who is not. Davis doesn’t think it’s a problem to have a guest on to talk about a particular topic who also has far-fetched ideas on “other matters that are unrelated.” In any case, Davis insisted, Klayman has “done his homework.” “Klayman has on any number of issues moved the ball forward — on issues like John Huang, Filegate and others.”
But it’s hard to figure how Klayman’s willingness to believe that the White House may have had one of its own cabinet secretaries murdered is “unrelated” to his credibility on whether the White House used FBI files for political espionage. And there is a larger issue. Klayman is only one of a large cast of talk show guests who are allowed — even encouraged — to cross the line separating legitimate criticism of presidential misdeeds from the most feverish and extreme speculation.
In a New York Times editorial last December, Anthony Lewis made a similar point about the line being crossed. “In the old days,” he wrote, “people who invented such tales were dismissed as the lunatic fringe. Nowadays they have the power of money to circulate their lies.” Indeed. The political right has done a splendid job building up a network of think tanks, advocacy groups and media outlets that propagate these charges.
But Lewis also misses an important element of the story. These political chat shows increasingly launder beyond-the-pale accusations from the fringe into the mainstream of political dialogue. It’s not that Klayman shouldn’t be on TV just because he has unconventional views. Perhaps it’s fine if chat-show producers want to have him serve up opinions on the campaign-finance scandal or what the White House was up to with those 900 FBI files. But in the interests of informing the public, they perhaps should also let us know that the expert guest also believes the White House may have had a senior U.S. government official killed on a hilltop in Croatia.
Operating Instructions: Every time you see the word “feminist” in the
mainstream press, please erase and replace with the following phrase:
“Democratic Party Hack.”
I can’t take it anymore! Every time another pundit or reporter claims to
describe what feminists are or aren’t doing about the White House scandals,
I want to scream, “That’s no feminist you’re talking about, buddy, that’s a
Gutless Wonder with a Vagina.” And when they say feminists aren’t talking
about the issues, I’m like: “YOO HOO! I’m talking, and I was a feminist
when many of these bozos were still Cosmo girls.”
Take the National Organization for Women — please! They’ve embarrassed me
enough over the years, and now I’m going to give them a taste of their own
medicine. They were always so holier-than-thou, systematically getting rid
of everyone who wasn’t just like them: white, upper-middle class, straight
(or closeted), sex-phobic Democratic party apologists. As you can imagine,
that’s not a huge group anymore — but they still manage to hang onto a
name that insists that they represent half the population!
Well, it’s all over, sweethearts. I’m taking away your library card, I’m
stripping badges and I’m not returning phone calls. Calling NOW
feminists is like calling the People’s Republic of China communist: Marx
and Emma Goldman are both rolling in their graves.
The label “feminist” has been exploited by people who wouldn’t know a
shameless hussy if she fell on top of them. The right wing correctly points
out that the “feminist leadership” are hypocrites to get upset about
Democratic victims, but not about Republican ones. The right has always
seen feminism as a partisan complaint center, and the way these flacks of
the Democratic Party act, I can see why.
Too many political eras have passed since anyone saw a grass-roots feminist
movement in action. Let’s look at what roots feminist theory is
really all about. With the current “Bill and Monica and Ken and Hillary”
melodrama, there’s plenty of raw material for acute feminist insight:
IF a feminist is someone who believes in a woman’s sexual self-determination, then feminists know Monica Lewinsky is plenty old enough to carry on
consensual affairs.
IF a feminist is someone who sees the clitoris as the seat of female sexual
pleasure, then feminists think that Monica is getting a raw deal if all that’s going
down are blow jobs.
IF a feminist is someone who analyzes monogamy as a romanticized property
arrangement, then feminists don’t care how the Clintons organize their marital arrangements.
IF feminists think that the personal is political, then feminists would appreciate the president and first lady sharing their
candid views on how couples can survive as lovers and companions over the
years.
IF feminists are for sisterhood, then Linda Tripp is no friend to anyone.
IF feminists are pissed off at the way older women are rendered invisible when
they don’t have a man to represent them, then feminists wonder if the Linda Tripps of the world are having their little revenge.
IF feminists look at the big picture of how women rarely rise above
second-class citizenship, then feminists are appalled at the few opportunities for women to be
somebody in the White House who doesn’t support a lesser man in a suit.
IF feminists are amazed at the everyday pettiness of sexism, the White House just looks like Any-Office, USA, writ large.
IF a feminist thinks that the leaders she votes for will fight like hell for
equal rights, against discrimination and for women’s power, then Clinton has been a big disappointment to all who supported him.
IF feminists hold their noses sometimes and vote for somebody just because
that person promises to hold the line on abortion, then feminists have got what they paid for haven’t they?
IF a feminist is someone who gets off on strong female symbols, then feminists are inevitably attracted to Hillary’s poise.
IF a feminist is someone who believes that standing by your man can bury you, then feminists are appalled that Hillary puts up with Bill’s bullshit.
AND IF a feminist is someone who’ll be damned if she doesn’t see her daughter have
a better life then she did, then a feminist would gladly take every penny of the 40 MILLION DOLLARS we’re paying Ken Starr (think about it!) to use instead for women’s
education, health, athletics, child care, sexual enhancement and artistic
development. To paraphrase a great old Another Mother for Peace slogan, “If
Ken Starr had to throw a bake sale to pay for his indictments …”
It’s a sad time for roots feminists, and it’s not because somebody might
have perjured themselves on the question of adultery. It’s because of the
role models we see before us: an arrogant husband who is hostage to his own
double standard, a first wife who is determined to hold onto power through
her husband at all costs, a young woman who thinks the height of prestige
is to suck off your hero, a prosecutor who thinks this country should be run
by a literal translation of the Old Testament — plus a cast of thousands
who apparently would sell anyone out to get 15 minutes on “Hard Copy.”
Isn’t that just a priceless vision for the next generation? Give me a
braless, ball-busting, hussy bitch bulldagger any day of the week.
WASHINGTON — If President Clinton’s convoluted health-care plan and other zig-zags of his first two years in the White House contributed to the massacre of congressional Democrats in 1994, imagine what Democrats, especially those running for election this year, are thinking now.
Not good thoughts.
The party of a second-term president usually gets blasted in midterm elections anyway. And that’s without being stuck with a president accused of having an affair with a young subordinate and then suborning perjury.
Prior to the latest eruption, Democrats were trying to concoct a message for the 1998 elections, and Clinton was busy blitzing the country with one policy proposal after another, hoping to define the homestretch of his presidency while assisting Democrats running for the House and Senate next November. What’s the message today? The Democrats want to do more for child care? You can fill in the punch line.
But the Democrats need the president. He is the one with the megaphone. Neither Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle nor House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt have the platform to pitch their case to the American public. Perhaps more importantly, the president is the cash-cow of the party. The Democrats are still millions of dollars in the hole, a result of the various campaign finance controversies. A dead-duck president means the money dries up.
Suppose the worst occurs: Compelling evidence emerges that the president lied, under oath, in his deposition in the Paula Jones case and pressured ex-White House intern Monica Lewinsky to lie in her sworn affidavit. The Republicans in Congress would have every right to consider impeachment. What do congressional Democrats do?
It’s hard to picture them, especially in an election year, rushing to the defense of any president accused of “Melrose Place”-like sexual chicanery and otherwise acting in stunningly reckless fashion. And Clinton in particular, with his “triangulation” approach, has not engendered great loyalty among congressional Democrats. They are still steaming over the loss of Congress and hold Clinton partly to blame for it. Many believe they were close to winning back the House in 1996 — until Clinton’s fund-raising peccadilloes became public. Should the allegations prove true, could you fault Democrats for not standing by their man? What candidate would want a picture of Clinton with his arm around him or, especially, her? Besides, where might Clinton find the time for a party fund-raiser, between the Paula Jones trial and possible impeachment proceedings.
However, congressional Republicans may not be so eager to rush to exploit the matter. There’s the old rule of politics: When your opponent is self-immolating, do nothing. And why consider impeachment, if that gives Al Gore, who would take over the White House, a head-start 2000 campaign. A long, drawn-out affair — one that might affect both the 1998 and 2000 elections — could be more desirable for the GOP (and less desirable for Gore).
But don’t underestimate the hatred of Clinton that resides within the conservative movement. Several Republicans may not be able to help themselves. And it should be remembered that, as of today, nothing is proven. It may turn out to be a scam, or a case of abnormal psychology. Or perhaps the charges will go unresolved.
Still, the stakes are enormous, not just for the immediate future of the president, the vice president and Democratic members of Congress. In recent weeks, Clinton has tried to place on the national stage a host of major policy prescriptions, from increasing education funding to a modest expansion of Medicare. Who in politics is paying any attention to them now? How many Americans will be paying attention to the content of the president’s State of the Union speech next Tuesday? Forty-one million Americans without health insurance? Boring! Clinton trysting with an intern? Roll out the media army.
It’s understandable. The story certainly is a talker. But if Clinton did indeed behave in such a caddish and illegal fashion, he’s done much more than place himself in danger. He has threatened his party, his policies and every principle he claims motivated him to go into politics in the first place. And that elevates this episode from a trashy, can-you-believe-it miniseries to a tragic national drama of multiple implications.
I lost a $100 bet when Bill Clinton became president in 1992, but even then I thought it was money well spent. During the preceding decades, political conflicts had ripped the country apart, threatening the underlying cultural fabric that held the nation together. These divisions were not helped by the virtual monopoly of executive power that Republicans had held during most of those troubled years. The indictment of the U.S. as an “imperialist, racist, oppressor” had begun during the ’60s, when the Democrats held the White House, in the fever swamps of the hate-America left. But with Republicans almost continuously holding the reins of state for the next 25 years, the animus and self-doubt spread to the Democratic political opposition, and thence to the American mainstream itself. Perhaps, by the ship of state being left to its critics, the Clinton presidency would begin a healing of the wounds. What better way to restore an appreciation for what America truly was when measured not by the left’s abstract and impossible ideals, but in the sober exercise of power in a complex nation and world?
As we approach the last phase of the Clinton era, I think my hypothesis was correct. While congressional Republicans may whine that the president has “stolen” their program, the salient fact is that he has begun to bring Democrats back into the system they were in danger of abandoning altogether. To take one crucial example from an area where Clinton is most suspect in Republican eyes: As recently as 1990, George Bush could only get three Democratic senators to support America’s deployment of military force to the Persian Gulf. Clinton has used American power against Saddam Hussein and elsewhere without serious Democratic opposition, conveying the message that even liberals understand that American power is the world’s indispensable guarantor of peace. In that sense, a serious breach has been healed.
There are also deeper cultural signs of a healing process, exemplified by two singular works, one produced by one of America’s greatest writers of fiction, the other by the country’s most creative cinematic talent. Appearing as they do close to the end of a decade of postmodern cynicism, both works are striking in the deep and traditional reverence they share for America’s character and mission — for who we have been and what we are.
Philip Roth’s novel “An American Pastoral” is an apocalyptic imagining of America’s second civil war, pitting an immigrant industrialism against the postindustrial (and anti-industrial) counterculture of the ’60s. Steven Spielberg’s “Amistad,” a historical re-creation of an episode from the dark age of American slavery, shapes itself as a metaphor for America’s first Civil War. One is a work of hope, the other of despair. But they are linked by their common endorsement of the American experiment, and their shared belief in the vitality of the American dream.
Roth’s central trope is the immigrant success story of a New Jersey Jewish family and the assimilation of its scion, Seymour Levov, into the American mosaic.
Known to friends and admirers as “the Swede,” Levov is a star athlete, a golden boy, who marries a Miss America aspirant named Dawn, has a child named Merry and, out of filial responsibility and respect, takes over his immigrant father’s glove factory. The Levovs are the ultimate testament to the merging of an outsider’s aspirations with the American dream.
Blasting apart this idyll is the Vietnam War and the terrible passions unleashed by the ’60s. Merry, the quintessential American innocent, metamorphoses into an anti-American terrorist (“for her, being an American was loathing America”) who blows up the general store in their small New Jersey town and, with it, the town’s only doctor. Merry’s bomb also destroys the Levov family and, with it, its cherished middle-class American dream. “That violent hatred of America was a disease unto itself,” Roth writes. “Three generations. All of them growing. The working. The saving. The success. Three generations in raptures over America. Three generations of becoming one with a people. And now with the fourth it had all come to nothing. The total vandalization of their world.”
There is no happy ending here. “Yes, the breach had been pounded in their fortification,” Roth concludes, “and now that it was opened it would not be closed again. They’ll never recover. Everything is against them, everyone and everything that does not like their life. All the voices from without, condemning and rejecting their life! And what is wrong with their life? What on earth is less reprehensible than the life of the Levovs?”
Who would have thought that the author of “Our Gang,” an unforgiving ’60s satire of the Nixon era, would, in 1997, write a passionate defense of the American way of life, a paean to the America that the ’60s had ransacked?
Spielberg’s movie tells the story of the revolt of African prisoners on the Amistad, a Spanish slaver, and their eventual vindication in the American court system.
Coming at a time when the cultural left labels American slavery as a black “holocaust,” an image conjuring parallels between the United States and Nazi Germany, “Amistad” reminds us of our roots as the beacon of human freedom, even in those dark times. “Amistad” reminds us that Africans were enslaved by other Africans; that, inspired by their democratic and Christian ideals, Americans and Britons ended the Western slave trade even as it persisted in Africa; and that white as well as black Americans were willing to risk their lives for the freedom of all.
Cinque, the leader of the rebellious slaves, tells John Quincy Adams that he is motivated to resist by the responsibility imposed by his ancestors’ beliefs, hopes and aspirations. Adams uses this as the informing metaphor of his oration to the Supreme Court, reminding the justices that America is a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the idea that all men are created equal. “We are who we were,” he says, echoing Cinque’s existential insight. “If we are to be Americans then we must be true to this ideal. If it has to take a civil war to complete the American Revolution and to keep that faith, then let’s have it.”
“Amistad” didn’t make many film critics’ top 10 lists. Siskel and Ebert, who selected Spike Lee’s anti-white “Malcolm X” as the best picture one year, couldn’t find a place for it. Apparently, the slight and forgettable “The Full Monty,” about a bunch of unemployed British males who perform a striptease to make some money, was a more worthy work. And Roth’s novel has been misunderstood by both conservative and liberal critics as a novel about the failure of immigrant assimilation.
They miss the point, as do the revilers from both left and right who do not understand the real nature of the American bridge that William Jefferson Clinton — even if he doesn’t know it himself — is building to the 21st century.
