CRIS ON SID: PART TWO
[I] always thought that it was very clever of Clinton to make a mystery where none existed about when, and even where, he had touched Monica Lewinsky. Since his denial was made partly under oath, and involved a legalistic definition even of certain orifices and appendages, it necessitated a minute inquiry. And this allowed Clinton's defenders to paint his critics?his critics? as "obsessed with sex." It comes down to this: Clinton asserts to the present day that he was innocent of perjury because although he did ejaculate in the intimate presence of Monica Lewinsky, she derived no pleasure or excitement from the moment. Thus, by a sort of psychopathic reasoning, it wasn't "sex" at all. I think this is one of the coldest and nastiest things ever said, and I believe that it should call our attention to a crucial distinction. The President did not lie about sex, as Arthur Schlesinger in the pre-impeachment hearings assured us a gentleman is expected to do. He lied about, and defamed, women. These included several women who had been quite fond of him, and who came to regret it. It wasn't enough for him to deny that he had lavished his attentions, whether wanted or (as in several thoroughly attested instances) unwanted. He had to say that the unfortunate but truthful females were liars, fantasists, job-seekers, and even blackmailers. Their veracity versus his voracity. And this from someone who had taken personal credit for a clause in the law on sexual harassment that allows men, as well as women, to be questioned about their sexual pasts. To say that he tried to put himself above his own law would be stating the merest fact. Blumenthal at least shows that he understands the full purport of this law, by reprinting some raked-up allegations about the distant sexual past of Kathleen Willey, which even if true would have given her no reason to expect that she'd be confronted by a distended presidential penis while talking in the Oval Office during taxpayer-funded working hours.
Arthur Schlesinger is probably not the man I would resort to for advice on sex or, indeed, on how to be a gentleman. His voluminous New Frontier studies managed to omit what so many other contemporaries always knew: that John F. Kennedy was neurotically promiscuous and, as we later learned, not above sleeping with gun molls in the White House and recruiting their mobbed-up boyfriends for his Cuba policy. A private matter? Only if we agree to think of the White House?including the Lincoln bedroom and the Oval Office?as private property rather than public property: a claim that Clinton was also vain enough to make.
I don't know Arthur Schlesinger, and I can't say whether or not he is a sexual naif. But I knew Sidney Blumenthal well enough to know that he understood the facts of life and could be very funny and acute about them, especially as they related to politics. He originated "Blumenthal's Law" to govern those cases in which mere speculation was involved. The law was a simple but useful one: "Everybody does something." I confess that I liked the echo of Willie Stark cynicism here. Whenever some poor sap in public life was found in a gruesome motel with a tired hooker and an expired credit card, Blumenthal would be first on my telephone with the latest and best joke about it. No harm in that, I say. I therefore regard it as quite impossible that he didn't know what many Clinton biographers have established: Clinton would have run for the nomination as early as 1988 if not for his fear of "bimbo eruptions" (please notice again that the women in his life are here degraded by definition, whereas the man is a passive victim). And if by any chance Blumenthal didn't know it then, he definitely knows it now, and has for years. In any event, I have to strain to believe the following statement:
Had Clinton had an affair with an intern? I just didn't know. I had no reason to doubt Hillary's sincerity in her version of events, and whatever my doubts, I wanted to believe her?to believe along with her. This goes well past credulity and into the realm of the servile. When I first read the same claim in a different form, in Kenneth Starr's report, I was dumbfounded. This gullible person was not the Sidney Blumenthal I knew.
Or was it? At first he had declined to work directly for the Clinton White House. He had been teased enough about being "in the tank." But when he again got the call, he decided that he had something to offer. And he was right in this. People chortled when he announced that he was working on "the Third Way" and on the upcoming millennium: it sounded Moonbeam-like. But I knew that Blumenthal had had an early understanding of the importance of Tony Blair, and that his best friend, Hillel Schwartz, had written a brilliant book about the significance of the year 2000. It turned out, though, that Clinton didn't want him for these nobler purposes. He wanted him as a damage controller with a certain sneaky side, and he wanted him as an inventive loyalist. He threw away the plum and kept the pit, of which this book is the ground-up residue.
[I] t would be invidious of me to go any further without saying that Blumenthal's memoir contains some disobliging material about me, and about the late Michael Kelly, a former editor of this magazine. I am sure that had he been allowed time, Blumenthal would have excised or softened the mentions of Kelly on learning the awful news of his death, outside Baghdad airport, this past April. But he and Kelly never really got along anyway, whereas my case is different. I can't burden the reader with a detailed answer to all his claims about me and my undoubted moral shortcomings (for a fuller personal account dial up users.rcn.com/peterk.enteract/sob.html). In some instances I recognize the events he describes, but with a Rashomon -like reversal of verdict. In some fairly unimportant cases he has remembered things that did not take place, notably an evening "we" had with Gore Vidal in October of 1998 at which I was not present. But I have to contest his weirdly detailed account of a lunchtime meeting near the White House that on several other occasions in the book he claims either to remember only dimly or to remember not at all.
This micro-event was later to mutate into a brief macro-moment. In March of 1998, having not seen much of Blumenthal since he had joined the Clinton team (I had been teaching at the University of California at Berkeley), I was eager to catch up with him. With my wife, Carol, I took him for a reunion snack. I don't think I will or could ever forget the transformation. Where was my witty if sometimes cynical, clever if sometimes dogmatic, friend? In his place seemed to be someone who had gone to work for John Gotti. He talked coldly and intently of a lethal right-wing conspiracy that was slowly engulfing the capital. And he spoke, as if out of the side of a tough-guy mouth, about the women who were tools of the plot. Kathleen Willey, who had been interviewed on television the preceding weekend, was showing well in the polls, but that would soon be fixed. (The White House had already released her personal correspondence, prompting a federal judge later to find a violation of the Watergate-era Privacy Act. According to the Justice Department, the papers were released after a conversation between Hillary Clinton and Blumenthal.) As for Monica Lewinsky, he painted her as a predatory and unstable stalker. At the time this prompted no conclusion other than the sickening but unavoidable one that Sidney Blumenthal could be brought to believe that a President can be "stalked" in his own Oval Office (and in about three dozen incidents, according to the logs that record permission for Lewinsky to be shown in at odd moments). When asked by my wife how he could credit the stalker concept, he replied simply, "Because the President told me." There's much else about that lunch I need never disclose, but I remember that he twice hushed my questioning wife by saying, "Carol, I could go to jail for what I'm doing now." I didn't know then, and can't guess even now, what he meant by that.
Thus, when it all became a legal matter, and I began to see reports that Lewinsky was indeed a blackmailing strumpet (followed in due course by claims from the White House that it had no part in the circulation of this defamation), I already knew and was also able to confirm from other reporters where this was coming from. It may seem sordid or trivial now, but if a certain Gap dress had not been retained, Lewinsky could successfully have been denounced and humiliated as just a bit nutty and a bit slutty by a man who had once dangled the promise of a permanent relationship before her dazzled eyes. And a callous perjuror would have flouted his own legislation. It seemed to me then, as it does now, that to permit this would be to acquiesce in an offense if not a crime. I had the ability to nail the lie, and when contacted by the House Judiciary Committee about the matter, I did so nail it. And I would do it again. I wish I'd had the chance to do it for Juanita Broaddrick, whose story of rape has withstood fairly rigorous challenges. (In this book it is dismissed because David Brock didn't believe it.)
Blumenthal insinuates, by means of a loose chain of conjecture and hearsay, that I concerted my testimony in advance with certain House Republicans. This I did not do. With a given amount of labor I could easily prove as much. I also think I can claim that had I engaged in collusion, I would have produced a bigger bang than I actually did, or perhaps than I ought to have done. As it was, my intervention came too late, and by then the Republicans had lost their taste for what was an unpopular and abysmally managed impeachment. An extraordinary fact about The Clinton Wars is the way that it relies on Sellout , the indignant account by chief counsel David Schippers of how his prosecution was curtailed and sabotaged by the Senate Republican leadership. It turns out that the whole thing was something of a sham: Trent Lott and his associates were willing to wound and yet afraid to strike. If this is true, and if institutional bipartisanship did eventually triumph, then Blumenthal is both astonishingly right and extraordinarily wrong. If the Republicans never meant business anyway, what becomes of the charge that they were engaged in a remorseless death-or-glory witch-hunt?
[O] ne final observation: The President was on trial in the Senate, not Sidney Blumenthal. Yet Blumenthal had to appear at trial, and his boss and friend did not. The affidavit I gave to the House Judiciary Committee was directed at the defendant, not at his underlings. If Blumenthal really has been able to question the staff or members of the House Judiciary Committee to any extent, he will know that I stipulated that my testimony was given on one condition: that it pertain only to this proceeding. The President, not his humble servant, was the source of the calumny that sought to obstruct justice. Were my words to be used against Blumenthal, I told them, I would repudiate them and place myself in contempt. I repeated this promise on Meet the Press , in an interview from which he quotes while affecting not to notice it. Yet Clinton later boasted through a spokesperson that he hadn't even watched the trial on television! Those who had trusted him were in the hot seat, in only the second impeachment in the country's history, and he hadn't bothered to tune in, or (since I think he was lying about this, too) didn't think it odd to brag of such indifference. I wonder how Blumenthal felt about friendship when he heard that.
[I] knew or met quite a number of other Clinton associates, some of whom left quietly but in disgust (like George Stephanopoulos), some of whom were found to have exhausted their usefulness to the First Family (like Lani Guinier), and one of whom (Peter Edelman) publicly resigned in something like despair. When speaking later of their experiences, several of them called to mind ex-members of a cult, its inner dynamic the assuaging of various exorbitant appetites on the part of the leader. It all makes sense as long as you stay inside the encampment, and it all has a hallucinatory quality in retrospect. Some of the loyalists actually broke down in tears on the day that Clinton told them he'd been lying when he ordered them to defend him. (The President held precisely two full Cabinet meetings that year: one to recruit apologists for his Lewinsky cover story, and another to morosely inform them that they could now cease and desist.) But Blumenthal's persistence in abject devotion has something almost impressive about it. At one stage in the crisis Clinton called Blumenthal in and said that he felt like the prisoner in Darkness at Noon . I remember laughing out loud when I read that in Starr's report at the time, and thinking that the President was at least being artful enough to flatter his subordinate. "I knew the novel well," Blumenthal gravely informs us here, before going on to suggest that a superior analogy would be the predicament of Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-four. Smith, we are then wrongly told, "commits the 'thoughtcrime' of having an affair with Julia, which is a crime against the state, which trains young people through compulsory membership in the Junior Anti-Sex League." That's not quite how I remember O'Brien or Room 101, but then, it's not quite how I remember the Clinton "wars," either. All the accused simply walked, and an Arkansas couple who came to Washington without a house to their name now have, after eight years on civil-service salaries, two or three mansions. Not to notice this is a form of doublethink: Blumenthal's flabbergasting literary comparison, an apparent attack on Party-minded fanaticism, is in fact a disguised and hysterical assertion of it.
This book overspills its ostensible subject and contains closing chapters about the grand Republican design to pre-arrange the outcome of the cliff-hanging Florida finale to the most recent presidential election. You may or may not believe that Al Gore was cheated of an election victory by the courts to which he had resorted; you may or may not have heard that the Clinton Administration was vigorously pursuing al Qaeda until the ball was dropped by the incoming Bush Administration. Blumenthal is highly indignant that some Republicans complained in public, when Clinton bombed Baghdad during his impeachment hearings, of a possible confusion between his own interest and the national one. As every liberal and Democrat understands, and as has been demonstrated so recently, such dreadful thoughts should not even be uttered in a time of?what was that again??"great national ordeals." Again the note of wishful thinking is struck: if only it were not for the events of 9/11, it would be plain to all that George Bush is not a legitimate President, and that he owes his victory to the long Republican association with slavery and segregation.
This makes it all the more peculiar that Blumenthal should close with a lengthy citation from someone he describes as a "great admirer" of history's greatest Republican.
Why what have you thought of yourself?
Is it you then that thought yourself less?
Is it you that thought the President greater than you? ... He continues:
You may read in many languages, yet read nothing about it,
You may read the President's message and read nothing about it there ... And he concludes:
The sum of all known reverence I add up in you whoever you are,
The President is there in the White House for you, it is not you who are here for him,
The Secretaries act in their bureaus for you, not you here for them,
The Congress convenes every Twelfth-month for you,
Laws, courts, the forming of States, the charters of cities, the going and coming of commerce and mails, are all for you. No reference is given, but this is taken from Walt Whitman's A Song for Occupations , which is not in praise of Lincoln but is instead a hymn to honest toil and the uplifting of the land. Very many stanzas separate the three that Blumenthal has chosen to run together, and the poem as a whole does not aim to make us excessively respectful of those who are kind enough to rule over us. It might have been more apt to pick something from, say, By Blue Ontario's Shore.
Have you possess'd yourself of the Federal Constitution?
Do you see who have left all feudal processes and poems behind
them, and assumed the poems and processes of Democracy?
Are you faithful to things? do you teach what the land and sea,
the bodies of men, womanhood, amativeness, heroic angers, teach?
Can you hold your hand against all seductions, follies, whirls,
fierce contentions? are you very strong? are you really of the whole People? But then, if one sought any further illustration of the ways in which partisanship dulls the mind and the soul, it might be found in Sidney Blumenthal's highly incautious decision to try and make any peroration out of Leaves of Grass, briefly pressed onto Monica Lewinsky as a courtship accessory by the Nixon of the liberals.
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