The Atlantic Monthly | July/August 2003
Thinking Like an Apparatchik
In his new book Sidney Blumenthal presents a disconcertingly cynical yet naive account of the Clinton years
by Christopher Hitchens
Ahh, here we go. Careful, your monitor may ignite!
.....
The Clinton Wars
by Sidney Blumenthal
Farrar, Straus & Giroux
[H] ow is it that domestic politics in this country is at once so rancid and so banal, so embittered and yet so uninspiring? Why should it be that two parties with few if any essential differences are ready to speak of each other as if a cultural or even a civil war were only a few speeches away? Obviously, much of this fatuous rhetoric arises from the need to disagree more and more about less and less, to maintain the mills of fundraising in a churning condition, and to keep the dwindling groups of genuine loyalists and activists in a state of excited pseudo-commitment. But much of the dankness and dinginess is owed to the influence exerted by professional political operators, those who have a careerist interest in "the process" as it is?which is to say partisan in theory and bipartisan in practice.
Those in the unelected election business who become celebrities are sometimes quite willing to work for either party. Dick Morris, to take a notorious example, toiled energetically for Jesse Helms before being hired by the Clintons. David Gergen's mysterious usefulness to a succession of Republican and Democratic Presidents will almost stand comparison with the mystical utility of the Reverend Billy Graham to Eisenhower and Nixon, Carter and Clinton. The self-satirizing summa of all this is the bizarre marriage of Mary Matalin and James Carville, who actually contrived to run opposing presidential campaigns in 1992 while still, at the end of the day, proving that the two parties were essentially in bed together.
The privatized and privateering class of spin doctors, advisers, consultants, fundraisers, and reputation mongers displays a weird combination of cynicism and naiveté. It knows better than anyone else what the candidates and parties are really like. But it is compelled, when disgust or alarm reaches a certain pitch, to act as if only a member of the "other" faction could stoop so low. This falsity and cheapness has now reached a point where, palpable as it is even to half indifferent readers and viewers, it may have become invisible to the participants themselves. Not long ago in this magazine David Brooks mapped a political sociology elaborating on the notion that the country was in theory divisible between heartland "red" districts and more coastal "blue" ones, the colors showing (rather counterintuitively, perhaps) a respective difference between Republican and Democratic areas. Soon afterward one of Bill Clinton's reliable yes-men, Paul Begala, issued a response, asserting that it was in "red" districts that gay men like Matthew Shepard were lynched, or black men like James Byrd were dragged behind pickup trucks until they died.
If this meant anything, it meant that the difference between a donkey and an elephant was the difference between democracy and fascism, or between pluralism and absolutism. But just wait for the good people's party to be caught doing something shady or vile; at once you will be told that it's no worse than what the bad people's party would do or has done. Immediately, in other words, the apologist will admit that the game is up, and that he is judging his own team by a standard (of ghastliness in others) that he himself helped to set. "They all do it" means, in this circle, "We all do it." But the apologist won't concede this consciously or honestly. Faced with the task of explaining the Clinton pardons, including one to Marc Rich, Sidney Blumenthal, a former senior Clinton adviser and friend of Dick Morris's, immediately responds, in The Clinton Wars, that Richard Nixon pardoned Jimmy Hoffa; and as for the $190,000 in gifts accumulated by the Clintons, it was "roughly the same amount as the preceding Bushes had accepted." Since he elsewhere accuses the Republican Party of being essentially lawless and segregationist, he might admit that he's setting himself a low standard. But he doesn't get the joke. And of course by the time he makes the accusation he has joined the ranks of the unlucky political-consultant high-flyers?the ones who have hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal bills to pay off. This frequent misfortune often entails the writing of a long and turgid and self-justifying book, in return for a completely ridiculous publisher's advance.
As the portentous title implies, The Clinton Wars consists of a defense loftier than its proximate subject. It swings hectically between major and minor themes yet somehow remains consistent. Obviously, the business of the United States cannot really have been consumed for so long in an argument about the old excuse that "blowjobs don't count." No President could have been so selfish or fanatical as to mobilize his administration on that point. A deeper reading must and will reveal that this was a serious crisis of the Constitution, pitting the grandest ideas of civil government against the meanest ones. Blumenthal cites with approval a statement drafted by many American historians convened by Sean Wilentz, which was inscribed with the signatures of Arthur Schlesinger and even C. Vann Woodward. This attempt to call Clinton to account would, "if carried forward ... leave the Presidency permanently disfigured and diminished, at the mercy as never before of the caprices of any Congress," they announced.
The Presidency, historically the center of leadership during our great national ordeals, will be crippled in meeting the inevitable challenges of the future. Truly has it been said that the future lies before us, with the past behind. The statement never exceeded platitude of this sort, and since it was made it has been replaced by proclamations from Schlesinger and Wilentz to the effect that the current President has been overbearing, in a time of "great national ordeals," toward Congress. Both positions may by all means be valid, but it will be noticed, I hope, that they fluctuate in intensity according to the relatively ephemeral matter of partisan affiliation.
My own view of this has been conditioned partly by my scrutiny of the great scholars and historians, but also by the more wormlike perspective of one who notices that political crooks and liars often get caught for the least of their offenses. That Nixon should be snagged, after so many high crimes and misdemeanors, for a "third-rate burglary" ... I suppose I viewed this as better?with all its congressional tyranny over the White House?than nothing at all. If I hadn't had some relish for the ironic contrast between the sublime and the ridiculous, I would never have become a friend of Sidney Blumenthal's in the first place, and would never have been pushed to the length that this friendship eventually required of me: a decision to testify that a President who was certifiably filthy in small things might deserve to be arraigned on larger matters also.
[I] f in the foregoing I appear a bit coarsened by twenty-one years' residence in Washington, D.C., I want to state for the record that I was not always thus. I remember the arrival of Sidney Blumenthal in the city, in 1985, as a distinctly cheering event. I'd first met him and seen him perform at the Lehrman Institute, in New York, and later visited him in Brookline, Massachusetts, and it seemed to me that he was just what the nation's capital needed. He and his wife, Jackie, were charming and smart and generous, and unlike many if not most politicized types, they had a real feeling for history and for literature. Blumenthal was politicized, all right, and very committed, but he had written a book that tried to expose the underlying racket. It was called The Permanent Campaign: Inside the World of Elite Political Operatives.
I learned a lot from Blumenthal's exhaustive knowledge of past campaigns and presidencies, and I was impressed despite myself by his ability to put a radical shine on the most wretched Democratic nominees. In 1988, for example, he called me to report happily that the candidate Michael Dukakis, while governor of Massachusetts, had issued a posthumous pardon for the martyred Sacco and Vanzetti. (Actually it turned out to have been a 1977 proclamation casting doubt on the fairness of their trial.) After the Dukakis debacle I asked him, "So, what's next?" and he gloomily replied, "Gephardt," in a tone suggesting that his own permanent campaign had become something of a burden to him. I knew by then that he'd been accused of being "too close" to politicians he'd also been covering: first Dukakis as governor, and then, before Dukakis as nominee, Gary Hart as a candidate. I didn't think this mattered much, because it was only part of the affectation of integrity in Washington to pretend that reporters didn't deal in "access," and because Blumenthal made no bones about his allegiances.
There was another flaw, though. It's actually quite a common failing among Washington intellectuals. They wish to prove that they are not just ivory-tower or pointy-headed; that they can be tough and practical and even, when occasion may demand it, ruthless. (One might instance Arthur Schlesinger's Camelot prose, or the crackpot realism of the Robert McNamara set, or the moral rough stuff generated by the subacademic subordinates of Henry Kissinger and Oliver North.) And one could not avoid sometimes hearing Blumenthal, in his hard-boiled mode, speaking rather alarmingly of Chicago relatives who knew what was what and how to fix things, even people. I admit that I thought of this as a bit of a pose, because his general appeal depended so much on his almost foppish manner and tenue and also on his happy resemblance to the young Christopher Reeve. Every now and then, though, I would detect a semi-audible note, as of a dog whistle subliminally summoning a sleeping Doberman. Equally harmless, I then thought, was his fondness for conspiracy theories. As a younger man (his background included Students for a Democratic Society at Brandeis and the Boston alternative Real Paper ), Blumenthal had spent some time with Carl Oglesby and the Assassination Information Bureau. Oglesby was also a very bright guy, and an inventive radical, but his take on the secret history of the country could most kindly be described as original. How shall I put it? I knew many radical and liberal writers with similar evolutions in their backgrounds, and Blumenthal?though having, unusually, a tendency to admire and emulate both the ward heeler and the radical victim?appeared to have both elements under control and to be able on occasion to be self-mocking about them.
But it's difficult for some people to understand, or to remember, how desperate the scene in 1992 must have looked to a professional Democratic insider approaching if not confronting middle age. The secret of "doing" elections, by subcontracting them to characters like Lee Atwater, appeared to have become solely the possession of the Republicans. And in the making of Presidents the Democrats appeared to have run out of human material. And then ...
Clinton brought in with him a stream of cool, brisk air from outside. At six feet, two inches, with a jutting jaw, gray-green eyes, a ruddy complexion, and loose long limbs, Clinton was the most physically imposing person in the room, as he almost always was. This style, which I would describe as "Theodore off-White," absolutely pervades The Clinton Wars . Sometimes it is unintentionally hilarious ("Clinton never left a roomful of people until he had spoken to and physically touched as many as he could"), and sometimes it is astonishingly grandiose.
Had the proposals Clinton made for new legislation been enacted, the United States would now have universal health insurance, affordable prescription drugs for senior citizens, universal day care, more schools, higher teacher salaries and higher educational standards, more gun safety, greater voting rights, new civil rights laws against discrimination, and an even higher minimum wage. Had his foreign policy been fully enacted, the United States would have affirmed the Kyoto treaty to address the dangers of global warming; more programs for education, disease control, and economic development for Africa; and more trade with Latin America. Had his administration had another year, he would have reached a final agreement with North Korea preventing it from developing nuclear weapons, and perhaps even an altered outcome to the final-status negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. Certainly he would not have abandoned either of those negotiations, as his successor did. Thank heaven for that saving "perhaps." Another term and there would have been a cure for cancer, an extra harvest, and a Five Year Plan for the eradication of poverty and illiteracy, fulfilled to stormy applause in just four years. The world's terrorists and tyrants, needless to add, would have been quaking and abdicating, as one remembers their so conspicuously doing during the mere eight years of the Clinton colossus that we actually were lucky enough to be granted, and which were probably all that we deserved.
Notice, above, that not only teachers' pay would have risen but also "educational standards." For me this illustrates yet again the way in which utopianism tends to become the subconscious enabler of cynicism. (The teachers' unions are one thing, but the standards ...) The United States Senate voted 95 to 0 to assert its opposition to the Kyoto Treaty, so it is idle to say that it would have been "affirmed" unless one surrenders entirely to wishful thinking. In sad reality, Clinton on his visit to Africa was compelled to apologize for doing worse than nothing about Rwanda. During his tenure health care as a topic was first bungled and then dropped, and as a practical matter was taken over by HMOs. And the United States was made to look silly and weak by the behavior of North Korean, Arab, and Israeli rejectionists. (It would have been false for Blumenthal to say that the Bush Administration has "abandoned" talks on either Palestine or Korea no matter when he wrote it.) Finally, this yearning talk of an extra year in office is somehow revealing. The Constitution mandates a two-term limit, and an 1845 congressional statute set a fixed date every four years on which elections must be held. If the elder Bush had had just one more year, the economic recovery, with all its speculative energy, could well have come in time to save him from that witless taunt "It's the economy, stupid." But then, if this republic?alone among major democracies?did not commit itself to a strictly predictable election cycle, the professionals would not have such a lock on everything from the Iowa caucus to the New Hampshire primary to the corporate logos at both of the party conventions.
[A] t any rate, in 1992 Clinton was no more than a moderate governor of Arkansas in a fairly mediocre year. But he immediately struck some people as the likeliest means of ending an unbroken sentence of Republican rule. Was this because of his adventurous attitude toward "re-inventing government"? His readiness to rethink Democratic Party traditions? His fairly but not very hawkish attitude toward foreign and defense policies? No doubt, for some elements in politics and journalism, all this was in his favor. (Hence "New Democrat," "New Paradigm," and all the other neologisms of the day.) For those lamenting the craven reluctance of the center left to challenge post-Gulf Bush, it was the sheer fact that Clinton was willing to run at all. He had a coterie of former Rhodes scholars who would support him unconditionally. And then there were those who liked him because he was willing to do anything at all to win.
I personally became powerfully nauseated by seeing Clinton up close in New Hampshire that year. His big, red-faced frame didn't seem so much "imposing" as simultaneously needy and greedy. He lied aggressively about Gennifer Flowers and, sitting next to his wife, let her do his marital propaganda for him. He fundraised as if there were no guidelines. When the polls seemed to sag, and he sought to burnish his tough-on-crime credentials, he flew back to Arkansas to oversee the execution of a brain-damaged black convict named Rickey Ray Rector. This episode isn't mentioned at all in Blumenthal's narrative, but it revolted a few people at the time, as it should have. By this stage Blumenthal was fully on board the candidate's train; and I'll never forget a Georgetown dinner, at which he was probably the most conservative person in attendance, where various liberals wondered aloud what the limits of "lesser evil" politics might be. One misgiving after another was mentioned, until Blumenthal impatiently quelled the bleats. "You don't understand," he said. "It's our turn."
There's no real trick to thinking like an apparatchik. You just keep two sets of ethical books. Thus, or in this case, only bad people get paid for their disclosures. Only Republicans ever use race in politics. And only reactionary thugs ever campaign as law-and-order exploiters of the death penalty. So Gennifer Flowers can be impugned, not for having a story to tell but for having a story to sell. Rickey Ray Rector can be given a lethal injection during a cliff-hanger primary because Clinton needs to show that he can't be "Willie Hortoned," as the saying then went. If Blumenthal can't mention, as he often does, that some of Clinton's critics made money on their efforts, then he can insist that the President was attacked by people who wanted to play the race card. Indeed, he asserts that it was "the racial dynamic" that led to Clinton's eventual acquittal at the impeachment trial. (To his credit, he does not stoop to insulting either black or white citizens by saying that Clinton was the first black President.) But in discussing impeachment, he does take particular care to remind us that one of the President's chief antagonists was a staunch supporter of the death penalty. These claims and accusations all invite a tu quoque of which Blumenthal seems almost ethereally unaware. If money is a motive in politics or disclosure, it cannot be the motive of one faction only. If the race card can be played one way, it can be played another. (It's true that with Rickey Ray Rector, Vernon Jordan, and Betty Currie, Clinton became the first to play it both ways.) If someone else's support for executions can be exploited to shore up or condemn one position, it can be exploited to shore up or condemn another. But Blumenthal just doesn't allow the thought to occur. The author of this book, a huge amount of which consists of excerpts and transcripts, was rewarded at the rate of more than $790 a page?so are we to regard this as mercenary?
I think not. I think Blumenthal would have done it for nothing. I think it is only for strict party reasons that he fails to mention Roger Tamraz and James Riady and all Clinton's other thick-envelope direct donors, and concentrates instead on saying (at excruciating length) that Whitewater produced no smoking gun. This may be true, though it is not true that the Clintons ever acted as if they had nothing to hide or nothing to fear. And the tactic of long delay and eventual disclosure, as with the final, grudging, surly admission about Gennifer Flowers, served to get them past several awkward political cycles. Bizarrely, Blumenthal asserts at one point that "it was not the distraction of his impeachment that somehow prevented" the enactment of Clinton's fabulous program. But a decidedly different impression is given by the bulk, in both senses of the word, of his narrative. Thus we come inescapably to the question of sex.
END OF PART ONE. |
