Vintage Didion (16 page)

—
1990

CLINTON AGONISTES

September 22, 1998

1

N
o one who ever passed through an American public high school could have watched William Jefferson Clinton running for office in 1992 and failed to recognize the familiar predatory sexuality of the provincial adolescent. The man was, Jesse Jackson said that year to another point, “nothing but an appetite.” No one who followed his appearances on
The Road to the White House
on C-SPAN could have missed the reservoir of self-pity, the quickness to blame, the narrowing of the eyes, as in a wildlife documentary, when things did not go his way: a response so reliable that aides on Jerry Brown’s 1992 campaign looked for situations in which it could be provoked. The famous tendency of the candidate to take a less than forthcoming approach to embarrassing questions had already been documented and discussed, most exhaustively in the matter of his 1969 draft status, and he remained the front-runner. The persistent but initially unpublished rumors about extramarital rovings had been, once Gennifer Flowers told her story to the
Star
, published and acknowledged, and he remained on his feet. “I have acknowledged wrongdoing,” he had told America during his and his wife’s rather premonitory
60 Minutes
appearances on Super Bowl Sunday of that year. “I have acknowledged causing pain in my marriage. I think most Americans who are watching this tonight, they’ll know what we’re saying, they’ll get it, and they’ll feel that we have been more than candid. And I think what the press has to decide is, are we going to engage in a game of gotcha?”

Nothing that is now known about the forty-second president of the United States, in other words, was not known before the New Hampshire primary in 1992. The implicit message in his August 1998 testimony to the Office of the Independent Counsel was not different in kind from that made explicit in January 1992:
I think most Americans who are watching this … they’ll know what we’re saying, they’ll get it, and they’ll feel that we have been more than candid
. By the time of the 1992 general election, the candidate was before us as he appears today: a more detailed and realized character than that presented in the Office of the Independent Counsel’s oddly novelistic
Referral to the United States House of Representatives
but recognizably drawn to similar risk, voraciously needy, deeply fractured, and yet there, a force to contend with, a possessor of whatever manna accrues to those who have fought themselves and survived. The flaws already apparent in 1992 were by no means unreported, but neither, particularly in those parts of the country recently neutralized by their enshrinement as “the heartland,” were they seized as occasions for rhetorical outrage. “With 16 million Americans unemployed, 40 million Americans without health care and 3 million Americans homeless, here’s what we have to say about presidential aspirant Bill Clinton’s alleged previous marital infidelity,” the
Peoria Journal-Star
declared on its editorial page at the time of the
60 Minutes
appearance. “So what? And that’s all.”

There were those for whom the candidate’s clear personal volatility suggested the possibility of a similar evanescence on matters of ideology or policy, but even the coastal opinion leaders seemed willing to grant him a
laissez-passer
on this question of sex: “To what degree, if any, is the private action relevant to the duties of the public office?” the
Los Angeles Times
asked on its editorial page in January 1992. “Shouldn’t our right to know about a candidate’s sex life be confined … to offenses such as rape, harassment, or sex discrimination?”
The New York Times
report on the
60 Minutes
interview, which appeared on page A14 and was headlined “Clinton Defends His Privacy and Says the Press Intruded,” was followed the next day by an editorial (“Leers, Smears and Governor Clinton”) not only commending the candidate for having drawn a line “between idle curiosity and responsible attention” but noting that “he won’t provide details and he need not, unless it develops that his private conduct arguably touches his public performance or fitness for office.” The same day, January 28, 1992, A. M. Rosenthal wrote in the
Times
that Governor and Mrs. Clinton had “presented to the American public a gift and a lasting opportunity”:

The gift is that they treated us as adults. The opportunity is for us to act that way…. We can at least treasure the hope that Americans would be fed up with the slavering inquisition on politicians’ sexual history and say to hell with that and the torturers. That would be a thank-you card worthy of the gift from the Clinton couple—the presumption that Americans have achieved adulthood, at last.

Few in the mainstream press, in 1992, demanded a demonstration of “contrition” from the candidate. Few, in 1992, demanded “full remorse,” a doubtful concept even in those venues, courtrooms in which criminal trials have reached the penalty phase, where “remorse” is most routinely invoked. Few, in 1992, spoke of the United States as so infantilized as to require a president above the possibility of personal reproach. That so few did this then, and so many have done this since, has been construed by some as evidence that the interests and priorities of the press have changed. In fact the interests and priorities of the press have remained reliably the same: then as now, the press could be relied upon to report a rumor or a hint down to the ground (tree it, bag it, defoliate the forest for it, destroy the village for it), but only insofar as that rumor or hint gave promise of advancing the story of the day, the shared narrative, the broad line of whatever story was at the given moment commanding the full resources of the reporters covering it and the columnists commenting on it and the on-tap experts analyzing it on the talk shows. (The 1998
Yearbook of Experts, Authorities & Spokespersons
tellingly provides, for producers with underdeveloped Rolodexes of their own, 1,477 telephone numbers to call for those guests “who will drive the news issues in the next year.”) In
Spin Cycle
, a book in which Howard Kurtz of
The Washington Post
endeavored to show the skill of the “Clinton propaganda machine” (similarly described by Joe Klein, despite what might seem impressive evidence to the contrary, as “the most sophisticated communications apparatus in the history of American politics”) at setting the agenda for the press, there appears this apparently ingenuous description of how the press itself sets its agenda:

A front-page exclusive would ripple through the rest of the press corps, dominate the briefing, and most likely end up on the network news. The newsmagazine reporters were not quite as influential as in years past, but they could still change the dialogue or cement the conventional wisdom with a cover story or a behind-the-scenes report. Two vital groups of reinforcements backed up the White House regulars…. One was the columnists and opinion-mongers—Jonathan Alter at
Newsweek
, Joe Klein at
The New Yorker
, William Safire and Maureen Dowd at
The New York Times
, E. J. Dionne and Richard Cohen at
The Washington Post
—who could quickly change the Zeitgeist…. the other was the dogged band of investigative reporters—Jeff Gerth at the
Times
, Bob Woodward at the
Post
, Glenn Simpson at
The Wall Street Journal
, Alan Miller at the
Los Angeles Times
.

Once the “zeitgeist” has been agreed upon by this quite small group of people, any unrelated event, whatever its actual significance, becomes either non-news or, if sufficiently urgent, a news brief. An example of the relegation to non-news would be this: Robert Scheer, in his
Los Angeles Times
review of
Spin Cycle
, noted that its index included eighteen references to Paula Jones and sixteen to John Huang, but none to Saddam Hussein. An example of the relegation to news brief would be this: on August 16, 1998, after hearing flash updates on the Omagh bombing in Northern Ireland (“worst attack in almost thirty years of violence … latest figures as we have it are 28 people dead … 220 people injured … 103 still in hospital”) and on the American embassy bombings in East Africa, Wolf Blitzer, on a two-hour
Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer
otherwise exclusively devoted to the “legal ramifications, political considerations, and historic consequences” of Monica Lewinsky, said this: “Catherine Bond, reporting live from Nairobi, thanks for joining us. Turning now to the story that has all of Washington holding its breath …”

In 1992, as in any election year, the story that had all of Washington holding its breath was the campaign, and since the guardians of the Zeitgeist, taking their cue from the political professionals, had early on certified Governor Clinton as the most electable of the Democratic candidates, his personal failings could serve only as a step in his quest, a test of his ability to prevail. Before the New Hampshire primary campaign was even underway, Governor Clinton was reported to be the Democratic candidate with “centrist credentials,” the Democratic candidate who “offered an assessment of the state of the American economy that borrows as much from Republicans like Jack Kemp as it does from liberals,” the Democratic candidate who could go to California and win support from “top Republican fundraisers,” the candidate, in short, who “scored well with party officials and strategists.” A survey of Democratic National Committee members had shown Clinton in the lead. The late Ronald H. Brown, at the time chairman of the Democratic Party, had been reported, still before a single vote was cast in New Hampshire, to have pressured Mario Cuomo to remove his name from the New York primary ballot, so that a divisive favorite-son candidacy would not impede the chosen front-runner.

By the morning of January 26, 1992, the Sunday of the
60 Minutes
appearance and shortly after the candidate sealed his centrist credentials by allowing the execution of the brain-damaged Rickey Ray Rector to proceed in Arkansas, William Schneider, in the
Los Angeles Times
, was awarding Governor Clinton the coveted “Big Mo,” noting that “the Democratic Party establishment is falling in line behind Clinton.” In a party that reserves a significant percentage of its convention votes (eighteen percent in 1996) for “superdelegates,” the seven-hundred-some elected and party officials not bound by any popular vote, the message sent by this early understanding among the professionals was clear, as it had been when the professionals settled on Michael Dukakis in 1988: the train was now leaving the station, and, since the campaign, as “story,” requires that the chosen candidates be seen as contenders who will go the distance, all inconvenient baggage, including “the character issue,” would be left on the platform. What would go on the train was what Joe Klein, echoing the note of romantic credulity in his own 1992 coverage of the candidate Bill Clinton (that was before the Zeitgeist moved on), recalled in 1998 in
The New Yorker
as the “precocious fizz” of the War Room, “the all-nighters… about policy or philosophy,” the candidate who “loved to talk about serious things” and “seems to be up on every social program in America.”

2

It was January 16, 1998, when Kenneth W Starr obtained authorization, by means of a court order opaquely titled
“In re
Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan Association,” to extend his languishing Whitewater inquiry to the matter of Monica Lewinsky. It was also January 16 when Monica Lewinsky was detained for eleven hours and twenty-five minutes in Room 1016 of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Pentagon City, Virginia, where, according to the independent counsel’s log of the “meeting,” the FBI agent who undertook to read Miss Lewinsky “her rights as found on the form FD-395, Interrogation, Advice of Rights” was, for reasons the log does not explain, “unable to finish reading the FD-395.” Miss Lewinsky herself testified:

Then Jackie Bennett [of the Office of the Independent Counsel] came in and there was a whole bunch of other people and the room was crowded and he was saying to me, you know, you have to make a decision. I had wanted to call my mom, they weren’t going to let me call my attorney, so I just—I wanted to call my mom and they—Then Jackie Bennett said, “You’re 24, you’re smart, you’re old enough, you don’t need to call your mommy.”

It was January 17 when President Clinton, in the course of giving his deposition in the civil suit brought against him by Paula Corbin Jones, either did or did not spring the perjury trap that Kenneth Starr either had or had not set. By the morning of January 21, when both Susan Schmidt in
The Washington Post
and ABC News correspondent Jackie Judd on
Good Morning America
jumped the stakes by quoting “sources” saying that Monica Lewinsky was on tape with statements that the president and Vernon Jordan had told her to lie, the “character issue” had gone from idle to full throttle, with Sam Donaldson and George Stephanopoulos and Jonathan Alter already on air talking about “impeachment proceedings.”

In most discussions of how and why this matter came so incongruously to escalate, the press of course was criticized, and was in turn quick to criticize itself (or, in the phrasing preferred by many, since it suggested that any objection rested on hairsplitting, to “flagellate” itself), citing excessive and in some cases erroneous coverage. Perhaps because not all of the experts, authorities, and spokespersons driving this news had extensive experience with the kind of city-side beat on which it is taken for granted that the D.A.’s office will leak the cases they doubt they can make, selective prosecutorial hints had become embedded in the ongoing story as fact. “Loose attribution of sources abounded,” Jules Witcover wrote in the March/April 1998
Columbia Journalism Review
, although, since he intended to attribute the most egregious examples to “journalistic amateurs” and “journalistic pretenders” (Arianna Huffington and Matt Drudge), he could still express “hope,” based on what he discerned two months into the story as “a tapering off of the mad frenzy of the first week or so,” that, among “established, proven professional practitioners,” any slip had been “a mere lapse of standards in the heat of a fast-breaking, incredibly competitive story of major significance.”