IF PRESIDENT CLINTON could count on anyone in the press, it was Eleanor Clift, the Newsweek writer known in certain quarters as “Eleanor Rodham Clift.” She never wavered.
As late as July 25, she was saying, “My feeling is that he told the truth.” Immediately after Clinton’s Map Room speech on August 17, she observed that “this was a consensual relationship between two people.” Monica Lewinsky “knew what she was doing, and she is old enough to have sex with whomever she wants.” It was Linda Tripp’s “betrayal” that “forced” Lewinsky into the open, transgressing a proper “zone of privacy.” Clinton, said Clift, “is an empathetic president, and he will receive empathy in return.” He is “not a CEO,” who might lose his job over an affair with an intern: “He’s been elected by the people.”
And, inevitably, there was the independent counsel to kick. After a night’s sleep, Clift announced, “Kenneth Starr is the one with the problem this morning, not Clinton.”
August 17 was a day of reckoning for the entire Clinton orbit, and not least for those journalists who had defended the president through seven months of fevered debate. Some, like Clift, were happy to exonerate Clinton, standing shoulder to shoulder with him, as usual. Others were disappointed in him, but still bent on reviling his enemies. And a few opted to dump the president altogether, turning on him with the fury of those who have been suckered and burned. The pro-Clinton media were forced to come to terms with the moment — and, more painfully, with themselves.
Geraldo Rivera was fairly nervous about the speech. For weeks, he had been bracing himself for disaster. He said on July 30, “If there is a semenstained dress, I will be disappointed to my very core. It will still be proof of just a sex lie,” of course. But “it will be such glaring evidence of insincerity that it will demoralize even those who feel, as I do, that Ken Starr is way out of line.” On August 13, following Clinton’s appearance at a memorial service for victims of terrorism in Africa, Rivera said, “We saw him today in all his wounded glory. Our president, our commander-in-chief, mourning the murder of our fellow citizens. Look at him, ladies and gentlemen! Strong and sympathetic; compassionate; compelling. And, I think, enormously believable.”
After Clinton made his partial confession, Rivera had a confession of his own: Clinton, in admitting his deceit, had “sent chills through my body.” But Rivera did not stay chilled for long. He charged that Starr was “trying to parlay adultery into impeachment.” And “to use a federal grand jury to go after something that is essentially the scarlet letter is, to me, an appalling breach in judgment that smacks of partisanship.” Rivera — practically alone among journalists — was willing to accept even the president’s claim of “legal accuracy” in his Paula Jones deposition: “That is technically correct.” As for Clinton’s statement that we must “move on,” Rivera chimed, “He’s absolutely right about that.”
Steven Brill, of “Pressgate” notoriety, was a guest on Rivera’s show, where he furthered his campaign against Starr, charging that the independent counsel was in gross violation of law and ethics, favoring pliant reporters with leaks intended to harm the president. Brill’s view of the scandal is consistent, if peculiar. On CBS after the fateful speech, he said that Clinton had failed to “erase a lot of the legacy of the many, many weeks of coverage that we’ve seen. We need to remember that this started with someone working with a book agent, looking for a book deal; who teamed up, I think, with a prosecutor who was in quest of a crime, and then together, they basically teamed up — I mean, it wasn’t a deliberate . . . — with a press corps that needs to fill a constant vacuum.” Brill also continues to heap abuse on ABC’s Jackie Judd for having been spot-on about Lewinsky’s infamous dress. For Brill, Monicagate can be understood as a concoction of dark Washington forces, with a dash of presidential stupidity thrown in.
Margaret Carlson, meanwhile, is expressing a new, somewhat subtle indignation. Like her employer, Time magazine, she has assumed a stance of moral equivalence between Clinton and Starr, declaring a pox on both their houses. She allowed on August 17, before the president spoke, that it was “shocking” to read polls indicating that the public is unbothered by Clinton’s “stonewalling.” In a piece published on August 10, Carlson argued that it would behoove the president not to make any confession at all, for it is “one thing to have an abstract notion that he actually had an affair and covered it up” and another “to hear it from his own mouth, to have the fig leaf of doubt removed and be forced to confront our own moral laxity in being willing to overlook it.” In this, she may have been thinking of herself and her colleagues in the pro-Clinton camp. So too when she commented on August 18 that, “in a sense, the president is protected from Hillary by her anger at Ken Starr.” In her post-speech column, Carlson had to agree with Orrin Hatch’s muttered evaluation of Clinton as a “jerk” — even if Starr (and here was the necessary symmetry) is a jerk, too.
Gene Lyons is an especially sorry case. He is the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette writer who sees an organized conspiracy to trump up evidence against the president and topple him. He said of Hillary on August 13 — using one of the president’s favorite phrases — that “she’ll be there until the last dog dies.” But Lyons had vowed a few days earlier that he himself would not. He told Robert Novak on CNN, “I would be bitterly disappointed” if the president lied about Lewinsky, “and although I don’t think he should be impeached for that, he would no longer have my support.”
But Lyons, too, proved angrier at Starr than at a dishonest president. He began his August 19 column with an excerpt from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four — the novel’s climax, at which the protagonist and his love are trapped by Big Brother. Lyons’s message was that Americans should be afraid — very afraid — of police powers like those wielded by Starr. “Make no mistake,” he warned: “Anything Kenneth Starr and his prosecutors can do to President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, they can also do to you.” Citing the Bible, Lyons dared his readers to cast the first stone. Clinton’s advisers and family had placed faith in the president. And “anybody who wishes to have fun at their expense — or at mine — for giving Clinton the benefit of the doubt, do feel free. Anybody can be lied to. Anybody’s trust can be abused. Nobody but the bitterest of cynics can protect themselves, and then by believing in nobody.” Lyons, for all his foaming about “illegal leaks” and a “sex-crazed media,” scribbled like a man bereaved.
The journalist who broke most dramatically with Clinton was Lars-Erik Nelson, columnist for the New York Daily News. Nelson had been as contemptuous as any of the effort against the president, lashing out at “the Gestapo School of Interrogation” and Starr’s “Night Ambush Squad,” with its “police-state tactics.” (Now it has fallen to MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann to do the Third Reich bit: “It finally dawned on me,” he said last week, “that the person Ken Starr has reminded me of, facially, all this time was Heinrich Himmler, including the glasses. If he now pursues the president, would not there be some sort of a comparison?” Olbermann later issued an apology.)
Nelson, before the speech, wrote that if Clinton lied, “he is unfit to lead the nation and ought to have the decency to resign.” Nelson was unconcerned about legal points, “all trivial.” For him, “the sex, if true,” was unforgivable, and “the lie to the American public, if it has been a lie,” was “reason enough to hound him from office.” What truly galled Nelson was that a Clinton mea culpa “would make heroes of Starr, Linda Tripp, and Lucianne Goldberg,” and who could abide the “vindication” of the “haters”?
After the speech, Nelson wrote another column, this one revealing the depth of his hurt. Clinton had acknowledged that “he is both a liar and a sexual predator.” Now “we get our noses rubbed in it.” Nelson, so stung, went all the way with his conversion, snorting that Clinton’s fling with Lewinsky was no private matter: “Exploiting her sexually was an abuse of power, a violation of trust, a betrayal of office.” Under President Gore, the dread Newt Gingrich “would be a heartbeat away from the presidency,” but Clinton’s resignation was nonetheless imperative. “To the officials who defended him,” Nelson concluded, “this was a shattering betrayal.” And not only, apparently, to the officials.
Thus, Clinton’s time of testing was a challenge for his rooters in the press, as well. Their numbers are fewer now; those who remain seem sillier. Even as they mouthed the usual points — “a dismissed civil lawsuit”; “four years and 40-million dollars”; “a 20-year-old land deal” — there was a quiver of panic in their throats, their confidence undermined, their smirks no longer fixed. Their careers will no doubt continue undisturbed. But from now on, things will, somehow, be different.
Jay Nordlinger is associate editor of THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
