Other books about Bill Clinton
[Scissors & paste] [Personal . . . political]
[Lies & triangulations] [British echoes of Clintonism]
hristopher Hitchens is a
respected and eminent British journalist who came to public
prominence briefly at the fagend of the Bill Clinton
"impeachment" fiasco, being asked to give evidence to the
House Judiciary Committee on a conversation which pointed up the
error of a detail in the pro-Clinton case. Since he had already
retailed the story in print, he agreed to do so.
In his remarkable and magnificently immoderate attack upon what one might well describe as Clintonism, he reports one of the less unsavoury impacts of his disclosure on to his professional life:
"It was instantly said of me that I did what I did in order to promote this very book - then still uncompleted. Other allegations against me failed to rise to this elevated level. The truth or otherwise of what I said was not disputed so much as ignored. When the finger points at the moon, the Chinese say, the idiot looks at the finger. As a much-scrutinised digit I can attest to the effect of that, too."
The allegation was that he had betrayed a "source", protection of which is part and parcel of conventional media cant. Indeed, it is such common practice to tell hungry journalists stuff "off the record" as a gagging device that it used to be (and may well still be) standard behaviour within the Hearst press to rise from their seats when any public briefing went suddenly not-so-public, and declare portentously that they could not stay for fear the promised revelation might merely confirm something they knew already.
As Hitchens puts it:
"Suppose, then, that I had lunched some George Bush flack in 1986, who had apologised for being late because the Vice-President had been delayed by the prolixity of Oliver North. The information would have been trivial at the time. But then suppose that I saw the same George Bush raise his hand a year later, to swear that he had never even met Oliver North. I would then be in possession of evidence.
"And it would be too easy (as a matter of fact it is too easy) for any Administration to make journalists into accomplices by telling them things, often unasked for, and then holding them to the privileges of confidentiality. Had such an occasion arisen in 1986 or 1987, I would certainly have made public what I knew. . . The pact which a journalist makes is, finally, with the public. I did not move to Washington in order to keep quiet . . ."
'Scissors & paste'
This fairly minor story is told as part of an afterword to the book. Its placing is significant, because if what Hitchens had to reveal was of greater importance, it might better have appeared at the beginning. But the fact is - and a scandalous fact it is - that most of what Hitchens tells about the intimate connections between the hypocrisy of Clinton's personal life and his public acts as America's chief executive is taken from the public record. In the best sense of the usually pejorative phrase, the book is a superb example of a "scissors and paste job", albeit framed in the colourful and sometimes discursive prose that lesser writers affect when they seek to don the mantle of a Thomas Paine or a William Cobbett.
Hitchens is not alone in such an affectation. It disfigures, and to a great extent disarms, much of what should be Norman Mailer's most serious writing. (And it is terribly infectious; it will not have escaped the reader that the present writer has picked up some of its mannerisms.)
But the scandal which Hitchens aims to uncover is not so much Clinton's lying and obfuscation (the prevarication that oral sex is not, actually, sex, so he was not lying when he said had not had sex with "that woman") as the fact that intelligent and seemingly principled men like Gore Vidal and Arthur Miller and Jesse Jackson have rushed publicly to defend the man whose entire life stands to rubbish everything they purport to stand for.
It is rather like red Ken Livingstone rushing to justify the bombing of Yugoslavia; it is not merely that one is bewildered to hear a supposed leftwinger speaking in the tones of gunboat diplomacy, but when many Tories are doubting the wisdom not only of flouting the UN, but also of the very principles upon which NATO itself was founded, such opportunistic bombast devalues the very currency of the entire left, and the validity of its claim to speak with any principle or moral authority at a time when moral principles are thin on the ground.
Personal . . . political
In particular, Hitchens successfully demolishes the left (or, actually, liberal) response to the Lewinsky affair: "Impeach President Clinton, But For the Right Reasons" (Hitchens' own capitalisation):
"The signatories, who were chiefly recognisable as members of the stage army of the good, had noticed that Clinton used unbridled executive power to make war in what used to be called the Third World.
"Reality, however, did not admit of any such distinction. In this instance, perhaps more than any other, Clinton's private vileness meshed exactly with his brutal and opportunistic public style."
In short, the personal is political; a man who betrays his nearest and dearest can certainly not be trusted to safeguard those who are nothing more to him than anonymous crosses on a ballot paper.
Hitchens takes us through the whole duplicitous history, showing how at the same time as he was tomcatting around on Capitol Hill he was also setting out to betray the poor and the weak who had thought foolishly that a vote for slick Willie would end and not continue the terrible years of Reaganomics.
Central to Hitchens' thesis is the strategy of "triangulation", an expression he has borrowed from Robert Reich, a former FOB ("Friend of Bill"), though the best definition of what this means came from the Murdoch journalist David Frum:
"Since 1994, Clinton has offered the Democratic Party a devilish bargain: accept and defend policies you hate (welfare reform, the Defense of Marriage Act), condone and excuse crimes (perjury, campaign finance abuses) and I'll deliver you the executive branch of government . . . He has assuaged the left by continually proposing bold new programs - the expansion of Medicare to 55-year-olds, a national day-care program, the reversal of welfare reform, the hooking up to the Internet of every classroom, and now the socialisation of the means of production via Social Security. And he has placated the Right by dropping every one of these programs as soon as he proposed it. . . the Left gets words, the Right gets deeds; and everybody is content." (Weekly Standard, February 1999).
In the words quoted from Martin Walker's book, The President They Deserve (Vintage Books, 1997, see panel at right for other Clinton books), Bill and Hilary Clinton resolved as long ago as 1980, "The lessons were plain; never be outnegatived again" (itself a reworking of segregationist George Wallace's resolve, "never to be outniggered again").
Lies & triangulations
Hitchens logs up the salutary lies and triangulations of Clinton's rise and rise:
Some detail might be useful here, and Hitchens provides it (though he did it in articles, for instance in Vanity Fair, at the time):
"Not once but three times last year"
[ie in 1998]
"Bill Clinton ordered the use of cruise missiles against remote
and unpopular countries. On each occasion, the dispatch of the
missiles coincided with bad moments in the calendar of his long and
unsuccessful struggle to avoid impeachment. . .
"On August 20, 1998, the night of Monica Lewinsky's return to the grand jury and just three days after his dismal and self-pitying non-apology had 'bombed' on prime-time TV, Clinton personally ordered missile strikes against the El Shifa Pharmaceutical Industries Co. on the outskirts of Sudan's capital city."
Then there is the time Clinton didn't bomb, when "in a rare show of Security Council solidarity, Russia, China and France withdrew criticism of a punitive strike" against Iraq. "The case had been made, and the airplanes were already in the air when the president called them back. No commander-in-chief has ever done this before."
The reason became clear when, on December 15, having been unable to get any concessions from Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu, and on the eve of another impeachment debate in the House, "the cruise missiles took wing again". The impeachment debate was postponed.
Finally, there is Hitchens' central thesis, that "Clinton's conduct in the Lewinsky and Jones and Willey cases represents a microcosm of Clintonism itself":
"There is, first and most saliently, the use of public office for private ends and gratification. The bodyguards bring the chick to the room, just as in any banana republic, and the witnesses can be discredited in the usual way, and the man who later uses the Lincoln bedroom as an off-the-record rental for fat-cats thinks nothing of claiming the Oval Office as a chambre particulier. . .
"There is, very conspicuously, the automatic resort to the use of publicly-paid officials (some with their consent but most without) as liars and hacks for a supposedly 'private and personal' matter. . .
"Scarcely worth noticing, as being too predictable for words, is the employment of White House full-timers to spread the idea that Miss Lewinsky was 'a stalker' - as if a president, who surrounded the Executive Mansion with ugly concrete barriers out of concern for his personal safety, and who is protected night and day by men who are paid to take a bullet for him, could be unsafe from harassment in his 'own' Oval Office."
British echoes of Clintonism
It is a complete and damning indictment, but as one finds one's way through the tortuous twists and turns of Clinton's finaglings, which must be followed by their chronicler, making Hitchen's own narrative in many ways as tortuous as the events he chronicles, one cannot escape an aspect of the story of the story which, surprisingly for a British writer, seems to have escaped him: the echoes of Clintonism in British politics.
No, not in the sexual antics of minor players on the Tory or New Labour benches, which if anything testify to their flawed humanity. No one in British politics has ever misused their executive powers to blacken the names of previous paramours as Clinton has marshalled immense forces (and money) to denigrate those he has unzipped his pants for.
But it is as Hitchens delineates the whole process of triangulation that a sense of déja vu begins to break through, because we have seen this process at work much closer to home:
"Clinton pretended that government would and should still be 'activist' for the powerless. But he was, in fact, a stealthy envoy from the enemy camp. In power, he has completed the Reagan counter-revolution and made the state into a personal friend of those who are already rich and secure."
He quotes Clinton saying to his aides: "We must have something for the common man. It won't hurt me in 1994, and I can put enough into '95 and '96 to crawl through to re-election. At least we'll have health care to give them, if we can't give them anything else." To give them, that is, in campaign promises, but not in a programme actually delivered.
The reality is a chilling warning of the consequences of "from welfare to work" programmes so beloved of New Labour:
"Supplied by the state with a fearful, docile labour force, the workhouse masters are relatively untroubled by unions, or by any back-talk from the staff. Those who have been thus 'trimmed' from the welfare rolls have often done no more than disappear into a twilight zone of casual employment, uninsured illness, intermittent education for their children, and unsafe or temporary accommodation. Only thus - by their disappearance from society - can they be counted as a 'success story' by ambitious Governors, and used in order to qualify tight-fisted states for 'caseload-reduction credits' from the Federal government."
The weakness of Hitchens' case is that he sees Clintonism as the misbehaviour of a wicked and self-obsessed man in love with his own genitalia (which, of course, he is); what he fails to observe is that the phenomenon he is documenting is happening throughout the western world, and triangulation is becoming the norm in politics in Russia and Britain, as it is in USA. Tony Blair is not Bill Clinton; because he is not, his programme is all the more sinister, since it portrays itself as the wave of the future, rather than the last gasp of a dying system.
The media always personalises the issues. Margaret Thatcher was the iron lady - a description which consolidated her power, at a time when hard choices did indeed need to be made, if Britain were to survive as a manufacturing power, though not the ones she made which hastened the destruction of our capability to compete in the world - John Major was a grey nonentity, Tony Blair is the man for all seasons. But it was not those characteristics that brought us to the pass we are in today.
In his philandering and prolixity, Lloyd George was perhaps the Bill Clinton of his day, but the Welsh windbag was able to bring in reforms of health insurance and unemployment benefits because they were necessary if the working men who voted for him were to resist the attractions of revolutionary Bolshevism. It was necessary for the rich to give up a smidgeon of their riches to preserve the remainder.
Today's rich does not see the necessity, and it will use a puritanical prime minister here, excuse bungling blowjobs there, as long as nothing happens to change, even in the slightest, the essential agenda of protecting those riches. In that task, Clinton has been, and will continue to be eminently suitable for office.
Which is why, of course, they did not impeach him.
"Yes, the President should resign. He has lied to the American people, time and time again, and betrayed their trust. Since he has admitted guilt, there is no reason to put the American people through an impeachment."
William Jefferson Clinton during the 1972 Nixon investigations
No One Left to Lie To: the triangulation of William Jefferson Clinton
Christopher Hitchens
Note:This book will be published in May. If you would like to be notified when it is available, please email us.
ISBN: 1 85984 736 6
£12 hardback
320pp
Politics
Other books about Bill Clinton
Serious
Go to "Not So Serious" listing
Addiction in the Whitehouse: Disgrace of the US Presidency, by
Canyon Adams (1998)
[US]
[UK]
Arkansas Mischief: The Birth of a National Scandal, by James
McDougal, Curtis Wilkie (June 1998 Henry Holt & Company, Inc.)
[US]
[UK]
Bill Clinton As They Know Him: An Oral Biography, David Gallen
(1996)
[US]
[UK]
Bill Clinton: President of the 90s, Robert Cwiklik, Charles
Cwiklik (1997) (Gateway Biographies)
[US]
[UK]
Clinton's Foreign Policy in Somalia, Bosnia, Haiti, and North
Korea (Essays in Public Policy, No. 72), by Thomas H. Henriksen
(1996)
[US]
[UK]
Comeback Kid: The Life and Career of Bill Clinton, by Charles
Allen, Jonathan Portis (1992)
[US]
[UK]
Death of Outrage: Bill Clinton and the Assault on American
Ideals, by William J. Bennett (October 1998, Simon &
Schuster)
[US]
[UK]
From the Eye of the Storm: A Pastor to the President Speaks Out,
by J. Philip Wogaman (1998)
[US]
[UK]
High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton, by
Ann Coulter (August 1998, National Book Network)
[US]
[UK]
High Hopes: The Clinton Presidency and the Politics of Ambition,
by Stanley A. Renshon (1996)
[US]
[UK]
Impeachable Offenses: A Documentary History from 1787 to the
Present, by Emily Field Van Tassel (1999)
[US]
[US]
Joy of Sex: Bill Clinton and the Conquest of Puritanism, by
Alexander Cockburn (1999)
[US]
[UK]
Monica Speaks!, by Monica Lewinsky, Joey Green (1998)
[US]
[UK]
Monica's Story, by Andrew Morton (1999)
[US]
[UK]
Pattern of Deception: The Media's Role in the Clinton Presidency,
by Tim Graham (1996)
[US]
[UK]
Presidential Sex: From the Founding Fathers to Bill Clinton, by
Wesley O. Hagood (1998)
[US]
[UK]
Sexual McCarthysim: Clinton, Starr, and the Emerging
Constitutional Crisis, by Alan M. Dershowitz (1998)
[US]
[UK]
Spin Cycle: Inside the Clinton Propaganda Machine, by Howard
Kurtz (1998)
[US]
[UK]
The Bill Clinton Story: Winning the Presidency, by John Hohenberg
(1994)
[US]
[UK]
The Clinton Enigma: A Four-And-A-Half Minute Speech Reveals This
President's Entire Life, by David Maraniss (1998)
[ US]
UK]
The Clinton Revolution: An Inside Look at the New Administration,
by Koichi Suzuki (1993)
[US]
[UK]
The Clinton Syndrome: The President and the Self-Destructive
Nature of Sexual Addiction, by Jerome D. Levin (1998)
[US]
[UK]
The Death of Outrage: Bill Clinton and the Assault on America, by
William Bennett, Charlton Heston (Audio Cassette, 1998)
[US]
[US]
The Dysfunctional President: Understanding the Compulsions of
Bill Clinton, by Paul Fick (1998)
[US]
[UK]
The Impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton: A Political
Docu-Drama, by R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr.(1997)
[US]
[UK]
The President We Deserve: Bill Clinton: His Rise, Falls, and
Comebacks, by Martin Walker (1996)
[US]
[UK]
The Starr Evidence: Complete Testimony from President Clinton and
Monica Lewinsky, and Other Documents from the Independent Counsel's
Investigation (1998)
[US]
[UK]
The Starr Report: The Findings of Independent Counsel Kenneth W.
Starr on President Clinton and the Lewinsky Affair
[US]
[UK]
The Starr Report: The Official Report of the Independent
Counsel's Investigation of the President
[US]
[UK]
The Starr Report: Complete with the President's Rebuttals,
September 10-12, 1998
[US
] [UK
]
The Tripp/Lewinsky Tapes (Audio Cassette, 1998)
[US]
[UK]
Video of The Grand Jury Testimony of William Jefferson Clinton:
August 17, 1998
[US
only ](NTSC format)
William Jefferson Clinton: Forty-Second President of the United
States, by Zachary Kent (1994)(Encyclopedia of Presidents)
[US]
[UK]
Year of the Rat: How Bill Clinton Compromised U.S. Security for
Chinese Cash, by Edward Timperlake, William C. Triplett
(1998)
[US]
[UK]
Not so serious
Back to "More Serious"
Dear Mr. President, by Rodney Guge (1994)
[ US]
[UK]
Dear Mr. President, by Stuart Hample, G. Brian Karas
(1993)
[US]
[UK
Dear Socks, Dear Buddy : Kids' Letters to the First Pets
(1998)
[US]
[US]
Dear Socks, Dear Buddy : Kids' Letters to the First Pets (Audio
Cassette, 1998)
[US]
[UK]
Dreams of Bill: A Curious Collection of Funny, Strange and
Downright Peculiar Dreams About Our President, Bill Clinton, by
Julia Anderson-Miller, Bruce Joshua Miller (1994)
[US]
[UK]
It's the Stupidity, Stupid : Why (Some) People Hate Clinton and
Why the Rest of Us Have to Watch, by Harry Shearer (1999)
[US]
[UK]
The Bill Clinton Joke Book - Uncensored, by Iain Dale, John
Simmons (1998)
[US]
[UK]
The Bill Clinton Joke Book, by Mitchell Symons (1998)
[US]
[UK]
The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Impeachment of the President,
by Steven Strauss, Spencer Strauss (1998)
[US]
[UK]
The Larry Nichols Story: Damage Control - How to Get Caught With
Your Pants Down and Still Get Elected President, by David M.
Bresnahan (1997)
[US]
[UK]
The Secret Life of Bill Clinton: The Unreported Stories, by
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard (1997)
[US]
[UK]
Top 200 Reasons Not to Vote for Bill Clinton, by Bradley S.
Oleary (1996)
[US]
[UK]