Camelot myth on which a presidency was founded
Peter Collier traces the roots of the Clinton debacle back to the Sixties
Clinton begins his 'journey of repentance'
IN Primary Colors, that celebrated roman à clef about America's First
Couple, the climactic moment comes when Jack Stanton (Bill Clinton) and his
wife, Susan (Hillary), are contemplating the release of damaging intimate
information about a rival for the Democratic presidential nomination.
Olivia Holden, an old friend and assistant who has come out of retirement to
help to rescue Stanton from a sexual slip-up that makes him consider this act
of pre-emptive warfare, refuses to let them do it.
She recalls the magic moment when they all came together during the
McGovern campaign of 1972 - a time, she says, when Jack and Susan were
"positively golden".
She reminds them of what they all believed during this time of innocence and
achievement: "Our job is to make politics clean - because, if it's clean, we win
because our ideas are better."
Olivia's words capture exactly a generation's narcissistic daydreams about
itself. They, too, had a Camelot back in the Sixties. America was coming
apart, but a youthful moral and intellectual elite had begun the long march to
put it back together again.
For the Clintons as well as their fictional counterparts, this notion of a golden
past became a foundation myth for their sense of destiny and entitlement.
Other Democratic politicians would eventually try to harness the legacy of the
Sixties. But of all of them it was Bill Clinton who spoke the language of the
Sixties most fluently. He sensed the era's transformative qualities, perhaps
because it was part of the before and after of his own life.
The bare facts of Mr Clinton's upbringing are a revelation - even for most
Americans. There was a father named Blythe who died in a car accident,
perhaps as a result of drunkenness, before Bill was born; a mother given to
heavy make-up, late nights out and frequent remarriage, once to a man who
might have run a string of prostitutes from his house; a half-brother who did
time in prison.
Young Bill may have lived for a time in a place called Hope, but he was
always in danger of having a permanent address on Tobacco Road.
It is understandable that a bright boy yearning to escape such a reality would
study ways to coerce people into accepting him, and that he would choose
elective office - in America a psychological ratification as well as a job.
The Sixties profoundly altered the life of this overweight and underloved poor
boy from the hillbilly hinterlands. There was the seductive embrace of the
youth culture with its ideals and fervour, and the rituals - sex, drugs and rock
and roll - that provided a passport to another country far from Arkansas.
Even more significantly, the Sixties with its contemptuous dismissal of
authority provided a justification for defying the social order whose strict
upholder he otherwise might have been. He was exposed to a generational
truth: the rules were for suckers. The rules were for the members of the Silent
Majority who mindlessly backed Richard Nixon and believed that
communism was a menace, that marijuana paved the way to harder drugs,
that adultery was immoral, and other old wives' tales.
The Sixties offered Mr Clinton and all the Clintonites-in-training the cachet of
rebels while allowing them to stay in a mainstream made ever broader by the
true rebels' actions. They would never be radicals themselves but they
accepted without question the radical critique of America.
Indeed, they experienced a frisson of authenticity when they heard the radicals
trash The System, that presumed web of imperialist plots, white skin privileges
and bourgeois hang-ups that defined America.
They listened carefully to the dialectics about how sexual monogamy and the
nuclear family structured the status quo. They tacked posters of Che and Ho
on the college dorm walls. But unlike those who put themselves on the front
lines of the Sixties, they never took irreversible steps that might compromise
their viability. They were not revolutionists; they were youthful idealists who
would use their moral passion to build a better world.
Mr Clinton would grow subtle over the years as a result of all the time spent in
think tanks and governors' meetings discussing abstruse policy matters. He
got rid of some of the baggage of the Sixties: the tendency to épater la
bourgeoisie and tolerance of Marxist dictators.
But he never turned his back on the era and its ideology of personal
gratification.
He kept sacred the central myth of the Sixties: that for all its rambunctious
excesses, this was nonetheless a time when a unique generation arose to
rescue The System from itself.
That's how the Clintonites thought of themselves when they arrived in
Washington: as clearing away all of America's barren yesterdays. The 1992
election was the first day of the rest of our lives.
Perhaps because of the influence of Hillary, a one-time supporter of Barry
Goldwater who had been even more galvanised by the Sixties than her
husband (she had written her bachelor's thesis on the radical community
organiser Saul Alinsky and had been an open admirer of the Black Panther
Party while at Yale Law School), the Clinton administration began with an
in-your-face challenge to its opposition.
Instead of patiently defining himself as the New Democrat he claimed to be,
the President launched a series of early initiatives that bore the indelible stamp
of Sixties thinking, among them, controversial proposals for gays in the
military and a mammoth federal health plan. Those plans were emphatically
rejected.
Suspicion over what now seemed a hidden agenda, along with questions
about the First Couple's lifestyle - an apparently sham marriage and a "deal"
on Hillary's part to suspend outrage over her husband's behaviour in exchange
for power - crystallised resistance to the Clintons. By 1994 the administration
was forced to take cover in conservative, quintessentially anti-Sixties issues -
balanced budgets and welfare cuts - adopting and adapting them as its own.
If they were forced to admit that Sixties thinking was in retreat in the political
culture, however, the Clintons took solace in the fact that it was triumphant in
the popular culture, its oppositionist mentality having colonised higher
education, entered school curricula, altered sexual mores and family life,
changed the media and the entertainment industry, and transformed the
nation's dreamwork.
Popular culture was as familiar and congenial territory for them as it was
forbidding and hostile for their opponents, a place where they could believe
they were still part of the adversary culture, as they had been a quarter of a
century earlier. From this vantage point, the Clintons could see that their side,
while perhaps balked in its legislative battles, was winning the larger war for
the American mentalité.
They spoke the language of Jesse Jackson and the civi1 rights professions in
their support for race preferences and the unappeasable claims of victimhood.
Through the semiotics of her semi-office as First Lady, Hillary sponsored the
factions of the women's movement that had become ever more militant,
discarding equity issues in favour of an Orwellian ideology that defined sex as
rape and the family as a theatre of cruelty where men abused their wives and
molested their daughters, creating wounds so deep that they could surface
only years later when dredged up as recovered memories.
It was the first post-modern presidency. Clinton might not know all the
scholarly shop-talk about "indeterminacy of meaning" but he was on the same
wavelength as those who did. His advice to Gennifer Flowers, which he
apparently repeated to Monica Lewinsky, was illustrative: "If they ever hit you
with it, just say 'no' and go on. There's nothing they can do [if] everybody's on
record denying it . . ."
Here is a blueprint for obliterating the claims of objective truth that would
please any academic deconstructionist.
Largely because of the suspicions Mr Clinton aroused on the part of those not
captivated by him, Travelgate, Filegate, Chinagate and other questionable
activities eventually came under investigation, none of them decisive in itself
but all joining in a suggestion of abuse of power.
Kenneth Starr, the special prosecutor appointed to look into these matters,
was, the Clintons claimed, a representative of that Other America that had
opposed them from the beginning. He was therefore out to get them.
It was true that this hymn-singing son of a Congregationalist minister,
obviously his personal and ideological opposite, fell into the role of his
Jauvert. For months it was an unequal contest with Mr Clinton nimbly running
circles around Mr Starr, buying off potentially damaging witnesses such as
Webster Hubbell and stigmatising the special prosecutor in the public eye to
boot.
Then America was introduced to Monica Lewinsky and began to pay closer
attention. It was at this point that Mr Clinton used all his formidable telegenic
power and the authority it had gained him in a furious finger-wagging news
conference that set the table for his enemies: "I didn't have a sexual
relationship with that woman, Miss Lewinsky."
Why would such an artful social climber not cling more carefully to his
lifelines? Why would a man who had depended on women en bloc as his chief
supporters since arriving in office use individual women as animated sex toys,
scuttling around on the floor of the Oval Office in their "presidential
kneepads"? Why would such a man risk everything, not for a beguiling
woman he loved but for the infantile sex he scheduled between meetings?
Some proposed that Mr Clinton had a "sex addiction" and perhaps this was
so. But sex involves principle as well as compulsion. Obscured in the lurid
details was the fact that the President and most of the aides who had rushed
to defend him from charges of misconduct were members of the first
generation to enjoy sex without guilt and the last one to enjoy sex without fear
(He'd had "hundreds" of women before he turned 40, he bragged to Monica
during their pillow talk).
The memory of having stood at this sexual pinnacle, a summit no other
generation would ever conquer, remained their grand nostalgia. Other things
had fallen away. Most of them had been forced to sit down and talk to their
kids about drugs, uncomfortably proposing that these kids should not do as
they had done but do as they said. But sexual liberation was their badge, the
one thing that defined them after all the other compromises and kept them
from falling back into the repressiveness of America's yesterdays.
Clinton aides began by saying that their man didn't do it and that Mr Starr was
on a sexual witchhunt. But, when Miss Lewinsky sang, they said that sex was
a private matter, although they were part of an administration that had run a
pogrom against privacy issues such as smoking and politically incorrect
speech.
Ransacking history for moral equivalents, they said that other presidents had
committed similar indiscretions - JFK, Ike, FDR, Harding and Grover
Cleveland, and even Thomas Jefferson and George Washington with their
mulatto mistresses and offspring.
In time, as the situation grew dire, Clinton aides abandoned all the feckless
rationalisations and unveiled their long-threatened "doomsday strategy" (in an
ironic reprise on the denouement in Primary Colors) and began gratuitously
leaking information about the chequered pasts of Mr Clinton's Republican
inquisitors.
Through it all, Mr Clinton, who had come to office claiming a special kinship
with John Kennedy (that famous 1963 handshake with JFK was the moment
when he pulled the sword from the stone) came more and more to resemble
Kennedy's antagonist, Richard Nixon.
Nixon had said that Watergate was only a "third-rate burglary". Mr Clinton
now said that he was guilty only of a third-rate sexual relationship. But in
neither case, of course, was it simply the act. Both men had launched the
spreading lie that eventually brings down the edifice built to sustain it.
As Mr Clinton began his slow-motion collapse, the scaffolding holding up the
Sixties myth of moral exceptionalism also began to sag. As his lying implicated
his supporters, it seemed quaint to recall that serious psychologists studying
the baby boomers in their youth had once theorised that they liked jeans
because blue symbolised honesty and honesty was their chief commitment.
Ultimately Watergate renewed America's faith in the system to cleanse and
protect itself. It is not clear that the present crisis will yield such an optimistic
object lesson. A good economy is the opiate of the masses and has created
the high approval ratings the Clintons now cling to.
The administration also counts on the fact that a
making-the-trains-run-on-time form of leadership is the most Americans now
hope for and that they no longer require a moral authority in the White House
capable of summoning them to great sacrifice or great achievement.
Perhaps they are right. Yet there is an inchoate yearning in the country to be
free not only of the sordid details but of the mentality that produced them.
It is worth noting that two cultural events have gripped America at the same
time that Mr Clinton's crisis has deepened. One was the biggest film of the
summer, Saving Private Ryan, about a former generation's sacrifice and its
unobtrusive patriotism. The other event has been baseball player Mark
McGwire's effort to break a home-run record.
It was the last good war fought by the generation that was forced perhaps
prematurely to yield to the generation of the Sixties, and the game that was a
national pastime back when America was still hot dogs and apple pie.
Americans know there is no going back, but they find relief in images of the
way they were. |
