More Democrats 2

Sustaining a Theme 2

My last post finished with a review of David Maraniss's biography of William Jefferson Clinton, a fairly objective account by an unauthorized biographer that concluded with his declaration that he would run for President in October 1991 at the end of a 32 minute speech at The Old State House in Little Rock, Arkansas.  Maraniss writes wonderfully clear prose as one would expect from a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist.  In one of his concluding paragraphs he writes:

His mother was there to hear him say those words.  She had been waiting to hear them since he was a boy.  She was the one who taught him how to block things out and to keep going through tough times.  She gave him his perseverance and his optimism.  Now she was determined to play out one final act of will.  Four months earlier her doctor had told her that her breast cancer had spread and that she was dying.  She had not told her son.  She hoped not to tell him until he was President of the United States. (First In His Class, p. 462)

My copies of the two books under review here

She got her wish, thankfully, but the future president would certainly have need of those qualities of "perseverance and optimism," not to mention the ability to "block problems out" and "to keep going through tough times" both in his private and public life during his eight years in office.  With this apt thought in mind, I now turn to reviewing my third book on Clinton, that is, Sidney Blumenthal's The Clinton Wars, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, New York, 2003.  Blumenthal (b. 1948) is a former aide to President Bill Clinton and a widely published and much respected journalist especially on American politics and its foreign policy.  He wrote for many publications including The Washington Post, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker.  He is also a widely published author of books on political issues.  Blumenthal was originally an outsider, as objective as any journalist could possibly be, but then came the time when the outsider became insider and was appointed as Clinton's special adviser.  It's very hard, then, for this writer to be fully objective about his subject, though once allowance is made for such bias, the book is quite a good read.  However, it is a weighty and thick tome of 822 pages that certainly does not make for light bed-time reading.  However, as a journalist, Mr Blumenthal knows how to write a thumping good story.  One can argue that our author was a special adviser to possibly the most maligned (by his opponents and the media) and yet probably most popular President (with the people) in recent history. That politics is a tough and dirty business we have learnt to our cost in recent years in Ireland, but certainly this has almost always been the case in the United States where every scintilla of a politician's life falls under the microscope of the media, where innuendo and smear are the tricks of the trade learnt early by all would-be politicians.  

In this regard, as Blumenthal points out in his scene-setting early chapters, Clinton was the Republicans' worst nightmare when viewed from the lofty moral heights of conservatism: the draft-dodging, dope-smoking, promiscuous Sixties' liberal grown up, grown powerful, and, worse still, capturing the new liberal mood of a country emerging dazed out of the old-fashioned reactionary conservatism of the George Bush Snr./Ronald Reagan years. I am often bemused by the vehemence of the opposition between Conservatives and Liberals in whatever country in the world, but am often shocked by its sheer bitterness in the USA.  Blumenthal traces such vehement and caustic criticism back as far as Jefferson - castigated in his time as 'a godless anarchist, sexual mauler, adulterer, and liar' (see page 49) - and more recently back to the opposition to Kennedy - 'loathed as a communist sympathiser, a Catholic negro-lover, a libertine illiberal' - as precedents, and examples of the Right's repeated failure 'to distinguish between hatred of the man and hatred of his politics'. In other words, politicians of all hues forget to their cost that attacking the person and not the policy is an age-old fallacy that they were taught in their first years of university or in their final years at secondary school.

Anyway, Blumenthal writes well as in the following where he describes what it was like for the White House Clinton staff  during the two terms in office:

Most of the White House staff just kept going on, like characters in a Samuel Beckett play.  They plodded on but were increasingly fraught.  And some of them didn't really know what to think about all the so-called scandals swirling around. The onslaught by respected news organizations couldn't all be driven by falsehoods, could it? They developed a self-protective view of themselves as principled people working for a larger-than-life politician who demanded all sorts of compromises to get ahead... (ibid., p.141)

That being said, there was no precedent, though, for either the endless depth of the Right's loathing of Clinton, nor the pathologically obsessive way in which they pursued him through a campaign of innuendo, half-truths, dirty smear and salacious rumour for most of his eight years as President. Blumenthal's book makes it crystal clear that the uncovering of the hapless Monica Lewinsky affair was the last, desperate gasp of a machine dedicated to the overthrow of the Democratic President at whatever cost.  I remember the loathsome, lascivious, salacious, lewd and wanton coverage of that unfortunate presidential fling with a White House employee that seemed to drag endlessly on and on,  -  admittedly much of this was self-inflicted by the President's refusal to face the truth.

One can only heartily agree with Blumenthal that whatever hurt was done to Clinton personally and indeed to his loyal and loving family over the Monica Lewinsky affair, much more damage was done to the ideal of the office of the presidency itself.   In the end, everyone was more appalled by the prurience of Clinton's accusers, as encapsulated by the doggedly self-righteous Kenneth Starr, than by the reckless promiscuity of the unfortunate accused. 

This book is interesting, too, insofar as Blumenthal maintains that they uncovered the murky subversion of the shadowy and sinister 'Arkansas Project.' This latter comprised a tightly knit cabal of right wingers, funded by one Richard Mellon Scaife, whom Blumenthal describes as 'an extremist billionaire eccentric.' He argues that the Arkansas project was exactly the same as the 'vast right-wing conspiracy' that Hillary Clinton alluded to when the Lewinsky scandal first broke. This, then, was the source from which flowed all the scandals and exposés, actual or otherwise, of Clinton, his wife, and his immediate circle, often described, replete with every sordid detail, in the pages of the American Spectator, or on the determinedly scurrilous Drudge Report website.  All of the latter was financed by Mellon Scaife, and Blumenthal outlines all the evidence for this contention. (See pages 92ff) 

This tome, then, is a complex, passionately-argued and well-written book that melds first-hand reportage, a wealth of often fascinating anecdotal material only an aide could be privy to and, more problematically, an extremely partisan and biased view of the proceedings it outlines.   That aside, however, for a political neophyte like myself, especially in American politics, it's not a bad place to start if one wishes to read a little about that murky world.

And lastly, I come to my final book, this time Clinton's own autobiography, entitled simply My Life, Hutchinson, London, 2004.  I see from the flyleaf of my personal copy that I bought this book in January 2005.  As a somewhat biased Irish man, I unashamedly proclaim my respect for this man's integrity and authenticity.  Over the years I have attended many courses on writing and all writers declare that the hallmark of good literature is always its honesty.  Reading this book, one cannot but be struck with the decency and honesty of the text from the very outset.  In his prologue to this massive tome that runs to 957 pages of text, he writes:

Whether I am a good man is, of course, for God to judge.  I know that I am not as good as my strongest supporters believe or as I hope to become, nor as bad as my harshest critics assert.  I have been graced beyond measure by my family life with Hillary and Chelsea.  Like all families' lives, ours is not perfect, but it has been wonderful.  Its flaws, as all the world knows, are mostly mine, and its continuing promise is grounded in their love. (Op. cit., p. 3)

There is honesty and authenticity in these opening words and both these characteristics are sustained throughout this well-written text.  Every politician puts his privacy on the line no matter what country he lives in, and Clinton knows public humiliation well in the light of his extra-marital sexual flings, his lying to the world about that, his subsequent abject apology, and most especially his impeachment, undoubtedly all sordid enough affairs to humble any human being.  As Regards Monica Lewinsky, Clinton states the following, which for anyone, let alone a man in the position of former President of the USA, would be humiliating to say the least:

During the government shutdown in late 1995, when very few people were allowed to come to work in the White House and those who were there were working late, I'd had an inappropriate encounter with Monica Lewinsky and would do so again on other occasions between November and April, when she left the White House for the Pentagon... 

In February 1997, Monica was among the guests at an evening taping of my weekly radio address, after which I met with her alone again for about fifteen minutes.  I was disgusted with myself for doing it, and in the spring when I saw her again, I told her that it was wrong for me, wrong for my family, and wrong for her, and I couldn't do it anymore... 

What I had done with Monica Lewinsky was immoral and foolish.  I was deeply ashamed of it and I didn't want it to come out.  In the deposition, I was trying to protect my family and myself from my selfish stupidity.  I believe that the contorted definition of "sexual relations" enabled me to do so, although I was worried enough about it to invite the lawyer interrogating me to ask specific questions.  I didn't have to wait long to find out why he declined to do so... (Ibid., pp. 773-774)

Clinton goes on to recount the overwhelming hysteria that abounded in the worldwide media and the terrible conflict he endured at having misled Hillary, Chelsea, his staff and cabinet, his friends in Congress, members of the press and the American people:

I was embarrassed and wanted to keep it from my wife and daughter. I didn't want to help Ken Starr criminalize my personal life, and I didn't want the American people to know that I'd let them down.  It was like living a nightmare. I was back to my parallel lives with a vengeance... (Ibid., p. 775)

To return to a topic from early on in Clinton's academic life at Oxford, namely the then raging Vietnam War, we get an insight into those heady days and into the personality of the young idealistic Rhodes scholar Frank Aller, who had resisted the draft for Vietnam and who would shortly afterwards take his own life:

Meanwhile the uncertainty of my own life was reinforced when my friend Frank Aller... received his draft notice from his hometown selective-service board in Spokane, Washington.  He told me he was going home to prepare his parents and girlfriend for his decision to refuse induction and to stay in England indefinitely to avoid going to jail.  Frank was a China scholar who understood Vietnam well and thought our policy both wrong and immoral. He was a good middle-class boy who loved his country. (Ibid., pp. 143-4) 

Speaking of Aller's suicide, Clinton speaks candidly about depression, and as one who suffers from clinical depression, his words ring true:

But I learned on that awful day, depression crowds out rationality with a vengeance.  It's a disease that, when far advanced, is beyond the reasoned reach of spouses, children, lovers and friends. I don't think I really ever understood it until I read my friend Bill Styron's Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness. When Frank killed himself, I felt both grief and anger - at him for doing it, and at myself for not seeing it coming and pushing him to get professional help.  I wish I had known then what I know now, though maybe it wouldn't have made any difference.  (Ibid., p. 188) 

Ah, don't we all wish we knew what we know now when we were young, innocent and somewhat naive or foolish in the ways of the world.  Unfortunately, the price of experience and wisdom, indeed, is counted out in years and in growing older.  

As a lover of symbols, I love the way Clinton ends this book - with the wonderful symbol of the moon rock.  the President had kept a glass case on the coffee table between the two couches in the Oval Office.  It contained a rock Neil Armstrong had taken from the moon and brought back to earth in 1969.  He tells us that whenever arguments broke out in the Oval Office he would say the following to his interlocutors: "You see that rock? It's 3.6 billion years old.  We're all passing through. Let's calm down and go back to work."  Wonderful symbol and an equally wonderful true story.  As a person who believes firmly in the spiritual nature of human life, I can only finish this post with the following reflection on life from Bill Clinton, a statement that, to my mind, cuts to the heart of all great spiritual traditions, namely the command to live well in the now:

Our job is to live as well and as long as we can, and to help others do the same. What happens after that and how we are viewed by others is beyond our control. The river of time carries us all away.  All we have is the moment.  Whether I had made the most of mine is for others to judge.  It was almost dawn when I returned to the residence to do some packing and share some private moments with Hillary and Chelsea. (Ibid., p.952)