The Mythical Clinton

Nigel Hamilton is an excitable sort. People who read JFK: Reckless Youth, the first and, as it turned out, the only book in a projected multi-tome life of John Kennedy, understand that he is a writer given to great hates and great crushes, vast and unstoppable waves of emotion that go on and on to great length.

His crush in that first book was on one Inga Arvad, the World War II flame of Lieutenant Kennedy shortly before he went off to the Solomon Islands for the rendezvous with destiny and the Japanese navy which would come in handy years later in the runs for political office that he never thought at the time he would make. A sex-bomb/earth-mother, a Danish edition of Sophia Loren, she impressed Hamilton even more than JFK, and the hot breath soon rose out of the pages as he detailed her remarkable attributes and the course of that intense and ill-starred romance.

The bête noire was Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., known to history as a man of crude ways and dreadful political judgment, but portrayed here as a figure of endless malevolence. His name seldom appeared without being attached to a long string of unflattering adjectives, and he was likened to Stalin, a tyrant and murderer whose similar first name was described as highly significant. At one point, on the basis of no grounds whatever, it was implied that Kennedy père molested his retarded daughter, and had her lobotomized to keep the truth hidden. It was, perhaps, at this point that the Kennedys withdrew their support, making the first book the last of the series. No one will need to ask why.

This warns but does not prepare you for what you will find in the second of what will undoubtedly be a full three-volume life of Bill Clinton, as neither the former president nor anyone close to him will find a thing about which to complain. In the Kennedy book, Inga Arvad and Joe Kennedy were not central figures, and did not completely unbalance the story. In this book, one’s luck does not hold. In this one, the crush is Bill Clinton himself, and the bêtes noires are his enemies–the racists, bigots, primates, low-lives, KKK rejects, and cross and/or heretic burners–who constitute the modern conservative movement and who, largely for reasons of sexual jealousy, focused their wrath on poor Bill.

The result is neither a case nor a narrative, but rather an adjective dump, in which truckloads of words–all meaning the same thing, and sometimes the same words, used over and over–are trundled over to the appropriate objects and unloaded on them, in a torrent of excess and overkill. If your politics are of the MoveOn.org genre, and your taste in literature is an Al Gore tirade mixed with the gushings of Barbara Cartland, then this is a book you will cherish. If not, you have been warned.

In theory, this is a fall-and-rise story, taking Clinton from his inauguration in 1993 through his early misjudgments and setbacks, through the crushing rebuke in the 1994 midterm election, to his recovery in 1995 after the bombing in Oklahoma City and his reelection the following year. In the event, it is an old-fashioned morality story, framed as a battle of epic proportions between the forces of evil and goodness, the former being “the cynical, self-centered, brazen, often hypocritical Republican ethos .  .  . the right wing trash machine .  .  . the white, re-incarnated, K-K-K fundamentalists .  .  . [practicing a] religious, right-wing ideology, such as was being practiced in Iran.”

As the author explains, “Newt Gingrich, and other conservatives had created an alliance of anti-everything .  .  . anti-tax, anti-abortion, anti-welfare, anti-national health care reform, anti-weapons ban, anti-environmental protection, anti-education, anti-public broadcasting, anti-civil rights,” a “sullen, unseen intifada” composed of “extremists and die-hard opponents” who “revelled in sneering rhetoric and malicious character assassination .  .  . even in these toughest of times for a leader trying to do his job in the White House while assailed daily by hate-mongers on radio, in the press, and in pulpits of the far right.”

In Hamilton’s eyes, it was this spirit that infused Timothy McVeigh, architect of the massacre at Oklahoma City, “a Christian-raised terrorist, no less fanatical and murderous than the Muslim extremists,” as well as Eric Rudolph, instigator of the bombing plot at the 1996 Olympic Games at Atlanta, described here as “an anti-government, anti-gay, anti-abortion fundamentalist” who later shot and killed a guard at an abortion clinic and was linked to a Georgia militia group that had been raided months earlier, one of whose members (“a bankrupt self-employed electrician”) went by the name “Starr.” In a short section entitled “The Two Starrs,” this misfit is linked to Kenneth Starr, the independent counsel whose investigations unearthed Clinton’s dalliance with an overripe intern, Clinton’s lies about which led to the impeachment unpleasantness.

If Joseph Stalin and Joseph P. Kennedy are linked in infamy by having a first name in common–the main difference being the 30 million-plus deaths caused by the Soviet leader–the “Two Starrs” are linked by a similar logic. If you find this kind of thinking persuasive, you will be moved, even thrilled, by this book.

And you will be moved even more by Nigel Hamilton’s portrait of Bill Clinton, described (after a few early, well-meaning stumbles) as a sort of Sun King/genius, capable of instilling reverence in casual onlookers, and reducing world leaders to awe. Actually, no one ever seems to have said he was stricken by awe and/or reverence, but this is no problem for Hamilton, who simply assumes it, and writes it as if it were true.

Among the many things the author finds true of Clinton are these:

And at his 1996 State of the Union address: “It was difficult for most congressmen and senators not to be swept along by the President’s sheer vision of a better society. .  .  . Viewers across the country watched, awed, [as he] articulated those democratic values with .  .  . the same easy sincerity that Ronald Reagan had employed.”

Brighter even than Theodore Roosevelt, more beloved than Ike, Reagan, and Kennedy, faster than a speeding bullet–this Super Bill doesn’t ring true. A graceful speech at the site of a terrible tragedy–“The final coming of age of the young president, in the same way as Cuba had been for JFK”–is not the same thing as threading the needle between a fatal concession and nuclear showdown. Clinton did not come to Britain as the man who freed Europe. As a menace, the Republican Congress was not in the same league as Hitler (“Appeasing Newt Gingrich–would be like Neville Chamberlain’s attempt to placate the Führer”). And the threat posed by the now-forgotten militia movement of the mid-1990s was not quite the same thing as the threat to the Union posed by secession in 1861: “The time had come for the president, like Lincoln, to challenge the ‘mobocratic spirit’ threatening the nation,” Hamilton intones at one point in his story. “America, the president felt, was in danger of coming apart.”

But the country, of course, was in no danger of anything, which is the main flaw of this book. Hamilton wants to see Clinton as a great man, facing terrible enemies, at a climactic moment in American history, with life-and-death matters at stake. The problem is that Clinton is not a great man, his foes were not evil (or all that effective), we were at that time on our vacation from history, and the only crises he faced–impeachment, and the loss of Congress in the 1994 midterms–were of his own making.

Most of his instincts were sound, and he did preside over a splendid economy; but he did not have to rescue the country from a Depression, and while he eventually did the right thing in Kosovo, the foreign policy problems he faced never threatened the country’s security. It was hardly his fault, but it was his fate to preside over the least consequential presidency since that of Calvin Coolidge, the first one in 70 years when the country was not imperiled by internal economic depression or foreign dictatorship, by the balance of terror, by nuclear warfare, or hot or cold war.

The fact remains that the worst day Bill Clinton faced would have been a day at the beach for John Kennedy, and that nothing Clinton did in his lifetime approaches the stature of Dwight Eisenhower’s pre-Oval Office career. Only a crush of major proportions could have led Hamilton to equate Kosovo with the invasion of Normandy, or think that the reception given an affable young leader by the British was the same as the one given the man who had helped to free Europe, and lifted the spectre of dread from their land.

As to his talents, Clinton was unmistakably the best politician to live in his decade, but the competition he mastered was, to say the least, underwhelming: His Democratic primary opponents were eccentric, minor league talents; the Republican congressional leaders had a genius for inverse publicity; and the Republicans he faced for the presidency were a generation older than he was, visibly tired, and markedly lacking in marketing skills.

He was better on defense than on offense, better at tactics than strategy, and even his notable triumphs had an ambiguous side. He won two solid electoral victories, but failed each time to win a majority; his party lost ground during his two terms in office; his heir and vice president could not succeed him in office. His party, so far, has repudiated his legacy: There are today no Clinton Democrats, not even his wife. Nor were his rivals as evil as Hamilton claims. Some of his opponents in Congress were a little bit strange (as were some of his allies) but they were hardly satanic, and Hamilton ignores completely the large bloc of Republican governors–many of them in “blue” Northern states–who were the authors of important reforms in the 1980s and ’90s and did much of the spade work for the welfare reform bill that Clinton signed in 1996, that helped reelect him, and became his most notable legacy.

While Hamilton portrays the political scene of the 1990s as one of head-banging hostility between the Democrats and the KKK party (aka the Republicans), it was also the time when centrists of both parties came together to pass NAFTA and welfare reform, rein in the deficit, and otherwise set the stage for the prosperity that was Clinton’s largest achievement. It is notable that the boom in the stock market, which would quadruple while Clinton was president, only began after the 1994 midterm elections, when domestic policy became a two-party affair.

As a man and a president, Bill Clinton had many good qualities: He was intelligent, resilient, empathetic, and a genuine policy wonk on serious issues, with generous instincts towards people en masse. But he was also undisciplined, self-centered, greedy, and petulant, which cost him the respect of a great many people, and kept him from being loved–as were Eisenhower, Reagan, and Kennedy, who had faults of their own, but not those. As a result, outside of his base, affection for him was frequently tempered by exasperation. Towards the end of his reign, his high ratings for job performance were coupled with low ones for character, and the public judgment on his impeachment years later seems to be that impeachment followed by acquittal was probably what he deserved.

The question of why Clinton was so much better after 1994, when he faced a hostile Republican Congress, than he was in the two years when he was untrammeled, is explained by the shape of his character: He was so undisciplined that he needed restraints, like a racehorse with blinkers, to focus his mind on the track. Once restrained, and given someone to oppose and play off, he was truly formidable–though he did not defeat Congress so much as co-opt it, and work out a synergy between their agendas, of which the public appeared to approve.

The 1990s were not a great age, and they did not produce heroes, merely gifted men with large flaws, such as Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich, who nonetheless did some good for the country. They and their age deserve an accounting. Alas, they will not find it here.

Noemie Emery, a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, is the author, most recently, of Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.