How the Pathology of Lying Has Made the President Increasingly Impotent

I

On a cold, wet day in mid-March of this year, President William Jefferson Clinton tried to rekindle the myth of “the man from Hope.” Only a couple of hundred people turned out for the dedication of Clinton’s childhood home in the small town in southwest Arkansas. His family wasn’t with him. (The home was called his birthplace but, actually, Clinton was born in a hospital.) The propaganda film shown at the 1992 Democratic Convention notwithstanding, it wasn’t long into Clinton’s presidency before we came to understand that Clinton was more Hot Springs than Hope (where he had lived only until he was four).

Hot Springs was racy, a gambling town, a place where people (including Clinton’s mother) lived fast and took chances. Georgetown University, Oxford and Yale gave him polish but didn’t change his essential nature. When I was reporting for a book on the first year of the Clinton administration, a longtime friend and supporter of Clinton said to me, after the story about Arkansas troopers supplying him with women broke in December 1993, “Bill has always been someone who has lived on the edge.” This person added, “I don’t think he thinks he’s vulnerable.”

Having pushed his luck one too many times, having had too much confidence in his ability to talk his way out of corners, Clinton had brought his presidency to the brink of ruin. That he had survived the congressional Republicans’ ham-handed effort to remove him from office was no great achievement. He simply outwitted them--which wasn’t hard. (He also had nearly all the congressional Democrats willing to go on the line for him.) One month later, even his hometown folk weren’t in a celebratory mood. And neither was the country. Clinton had worn us out.

Since the impeachment battle, Clinton has shown that he can’t break at least certain habits. (Others we don’t know about, at least yet.) He simply couldn’t not be cute in his press conference answers on alleged Chinese theft of our nuclear secrets.

Asked at a March 20 press conference whether his “legacy will be about lying,” Clinton offered a revealing reply. “There will be a box score, and there will be that one negative,” he said in reference to his year of lies about his dalliance with Monica Lewinsky. “And then there will be the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of times when the record will show that I did not abuse my authority as President, that I was truthful with the American people, and scores and scores of allegations were made against me and widely publicized without any regard to whether they were true or not.” There was a pathology in that answer that wasn’t reassuring. Clinton seems to have a disturbingly tenuous grip on reality. A cabinet-level official once told me that he and a colleague agreed that while Clinton was so busy spinning other people, the main person he spun was himself.

The upshot is that even when Clinton does the things he’s particularly good at--talking to students at a school in Alexandria, Va., after the horror of Littleton, Colo.; taking on “the gun culture” in urging tighter gun control laws--he doesn’t reach us in the way he might have before. There’s been too much lip-biting fakery.

II

Christopher Hitchens, the writer and deliberate controversialist, has long sensed that there’s something rotten at Clinton’s core, and in his new book, “No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulation of William Jefferson Clinton,” a stinging polemic, he lets fly. “Triangulation” refers of course to the approach, urged on him by the cynical strategist Dick Morris, whom Clinton brought in after the Republicans swept Congress in 1994, of aligning himself with neither the Democrats nor the Republicans, of having an ideology-free (if not content-free) presidency.

Hitchens makes a strong case that Clinton actually had been following that strategy for a long time and, if anything, leaned toward the conservatives. He points to Clinton’s breaking off from his struggle in the 1992 New Hampshire primary (he was dropping in the polls because of the Gennifer Flowers matter) to fly back to Little Rock to oversee the execution of the mentally retarded Rickey Ray Rector. I can recall some supporters of Clinton at that time stating matter-of-factly that if Clinton weren’t running for the presidency, Rector wouldn’t have been killed--and then getting on with the pragmatic business of getting him elected. But Hitchens, rightly, can’t let it go. “This moment deserves to be remembered,” Hitchens writes, “because it introduces a Clintonian mannerism of faux ‘concern’ that has since become tediously familiar” and “because it marks the first of many times that Clinton would deliberately opt for death as a means of distraction from sex.”

As a controversialist, Hitchens likes to shock. He’ll say things few others would. He’ll choose targets few others would: Mother Teresa, Princess Diana. But he usually has a point. His book on Mother Teresa, provocatively titled, “The Missionary Position,” raised real questions about how patients were treated at her hospices and where all the money that was bestowed upon her went.

Hitchens’ point about Rector as a Clintonian way of distracting the public from sex scandals by opting for death feeds into his argument that the bombing, shortly after Clinton’s ill-received confession to the public last August of an “inappropriate” relationship with Monica Lewinsky, of both the chemical plant in Sudan (which later became highly suspect) and of the supposed meeting place in Afghanistan of the terrorist Bin Laden, as well as the bombing of Iraq on the eve of the House of Representatives’ voting on impeachment, were deliberate attempts to distract the public from his sex-driven political crisis. The case Hitchens makes is hard to brush away.

He takes a series of incidents involving Clinton--his walking away from the nomination of Lani Guinier, firing Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders (for talking about masturbation), curbing affirmative action and even allowing himself to get “caught” playing golf at an all-white club during the 1992 election--to not just question whether Clinton is sincere in his supposed empathy with blacks but also to charge him with having “a southern strategy.” He hammers Clinton for signing a harsh welfare bill (at Morris’ urging) in 1995, which broke the 60-year contract between the federal government and the poor and questions, as more people should, what lies behind the glowing figures given out by ambitious governors of how many people are, as a result, “off the rolls.” And he pays attention to one of the darker and under-explored aspects of the Clinton presidency: the use of private investigators to get the goods on inconvenient women so that they could be trashed if they talked--and to do who knows what else?

Hitchens rejects the distinction, made by Clinton supporters during the impeachment proceedings, between Clinton’s private and public behavior. (“Clinton’s private vileness meshed exactly with his brutal and opportunistic public style.”)

As a polemicist, Hitchens draws the darkest interpretations and sometimes stretches. There is no evidence that the money offered to the Clintons’ legal defense fund by Charlie Trie, the former Little Rock restaurateur who became a cash-flow to Clinton and hung around the White House, went through the Democratic National Committee, as Hitchens asserts. (Trie walked in the door of the presidential trust’s office with it. The money came from a strange Taiwan-based religious sect. It was turned back, but the Clinton White House kept this information under wraps until after the 1996 election.) It was the case, and not just White House spin, as Hitchens suggests, that Republican senators didn’t want to call Clinton’s secretary, Betty Currie, as a witness in the Senate trial for fear they would look like a bunch of white men beating up on a black woman.

Hitchens obviously loathes Clinton, finds him a lying, ruthless, low-life. But in this compelling, disturbing, entertaining, necessary book, he raises questions that cannot be ignored.

III

In a very different kind of book, “Uncovering Clinton,” Michael Isikoff, the Newsweek reporter who did the most to disclose the sex scandal that became a crisis of the Clinton regime, we get another disturbing picture of Clinton.

We see him manipulating his aides to mislead, if not lie, for him. He had Mark Gearan, his then-communications director and a man of thorough integrity, tell the press concerning Paula Jones’ charge that Clinton had had a state trooper take her to a hotel room, where he made a lewd advance to her: “He was never alone in a hotel with her.” Trained as we should have been by then to parse his every statement, we still let Clinton get away with that one for a while. (Of course other people were in the hotel.) We see more of the role of Clinton’s mysterious consigliere, White House aide Bruce Lindsey, who keeps turning up when there’s a potential sex scandal to quash. We get glimpses of the work of the private investigators. We see, in other words, the same crude, ruthless Clinton that Hitchens described, if more heatedly.

This wasn’t Isikoff’s intention; he set out to tell the story of how he did it. Isikoff, a hard-bitten, aggressive and unassuming reporter of the old school, doesn’t attempt to glamorize or glorify himself, as has happened in some previous accounts of reporting triumphs. He presents himself as at times puzzled, and worried, about finding himself in the midst of the story, even a participant in it, that was to take on such major dimensions. It’s to Isikoff’s credit that he thought about this. But it should not have come as a surprise to him. One of the occupational hazards of a Washington journalist (and, undoubtedly, journalists elsewhere) is that people will try to use them: to plant stories with them, to wreak revenge through them (which the agent Lucianne Goldberg did through Isikoff, as he recognized). It’s not uncommon for political agents to try to find out what a certain journalist is working on and to try to shape the story or head it off. One must constantly ask oneself: Why is this person telling me this? But rarely is the story as big and as consequential as the one Isikoff was working on.

In his book, Isikoff faces the other big question raised by his reporting (and by other journalists when they joined the hunt): Is it the role of reporters to report on an official’s private life? Isikoff rightly breaks down the question, answering “no” if it is simply a matter of private life and doesn’t affect the performance of public duties. But, as he points out, the later knowledge of President John F. Kennedy’s recklessness (sleeping with, among others, “the girlfriend of a Chicago mobster who had been under contract with the CIA to assassinate Fidel Castro”) began to change the journalistic norm. As did Gary Hart’s fooling around in the midst of his campaign for the presidency. The risks these men took, the lack of judgment they showed, did constitute a matter for public concern.

The line will never be a clear one, and we might ask: Were we better off for knowing about Lewinsky? Isikoff, who started out in 1994 with the Jones case and then, in order to judge the weight of that, branched out into a broader examination of Clinton’s extra-marital sex life--whereupon he stumbled across Linda Tripp, Kathleen Willey, Goldberg and, eventually, Monica Lewinsky--felt, even at the outset, that “[t]he charges against Clinton, running from Flowers and the troopers to Paula Jones, pointed to something more fundamental: a continuing pattern of reckless and even compulsive behavior that, if true, would almost surely affect the course of his presidency.” He was certainly right about that. And that’s why, repelling and distracting as it was, we did need to know about Lewinsky. (The chance Clinton took that a foreign power would pick up his late-night phone sex sessions with Lewinsky was paid too scant attention as the sex-scandal crisis went on.)

One of the more fascinating sagas in Isikoff’s book is the tale of why the Jones case wasn’t settled before disaster struck. And we get the clearest picture yet of how the Jones case morphed into the Lewinsky case.

Several of the characters in this strange story are unsavory, and there is a certain yeccchhh factor in being confronted with them again. Whatever positive aspects there have been to the Clinton presidency aren’t here (as they certainly aren’t in Hitchens’ diatribe). But Isikoff has written a lively, highly readable and attention-holding account, with much that is new, about how one of the strangest episodes in the history of the American presidency came about.

IV

The post-impeachment Clinton presidency is a painful one to behold. It’s in one sense an extenuation of the overall tragedy of his presidency. Clinton is one of the smartest people to have ever served as president: His mind is capacious and capable of making connections among things he has read or heard. He even came into his presidency with a vision: that in a changing, increasingly global economy people should be given an opportunity for lifelong learning and training in order to adjust to the continuing changes. It was an apt vision, big enough to speak to a large part of the country’s needs and anxieties. A companion piece of the vision was expansion of trade, to nurture national growth.

But after the Republicans’ 1994 victory, a repudiation of both Clinton and his wife (for her hectoring approach to critics of her ill-thought-out health-care plan), Clinton lost his vision and his nerve and brought in the amoral Morris. From then on, the Clinton presidency stood for bits and bites to buy off one constituency or another--and whatever else would get him reelected (such as signing, at Morris’ importuning, the welfare bill).

All of this was pre-Lewinsky.

But Clinton also has paid a fearful price for the ordeal he put the nation through because he had indulged his Brobdingnagian libido. Before the sex scandal and the year of lies, Clinton already had frayed credibility--with the Congress and with some of the public. On Capitol Hill he was little trusted by either political party. He had sold his “fellow” Democrats down the river more than once. But the consequence of the sex scandal is that now no one believes him. As the impeachment struggle went on and Clinton was caught in one lie after another, I thought that that was the greatest danger. The question was whether he’d be able to govern after that. It’s still a question. A president who is trusted by none of the politicians with whom he has to deal, whose word counts for nothing, is an endangered president. With the rather large exception of starting a war (for which he’s having difficulty getting congressional support), Clinton is becoming irrelevant. It’s hardly a good situation for the country either.