“The president’s enemies played on his weak character to get him to commit crimes, then used their majority . . . to try to drive him from office.” This is how Jonathan Alter summarized last year’s events in a recent Newsweek column. It may be the most fatuous journalistic sentence written in a low, dishonest year that offered plenty of competition.
Alter has along been an unabashed Clinton admirer, so it comes as no surprise to find him among those whose “high crimes” standards are located in the nosebleed section. Nor is his penchant for ultra-reductionist rhetoric — “Is Clinton’s lying about whether he touched Monica Lewinsky’s breasts comparable to treason?” — especially novel any more. But when he offers absolution to the president and shifts all blame to undefined “enemies,” he goes beyond routine special pleading and trafficks in the kind of word-mauling dishonesty worthy of, well, you-know-who. It is enough to make one wonder whether favored reporters are now being rewarded by the White House with special weekend tutorials on truth-bending.
There is another distortion in this same column that is even more egregious. Alter claims that the public had been given fair warning of Clinton’s character because of what reporters like him had revealed about the Gennifer Flowers episode in 1992. But worn copies of Newsweek and the famous Star articles about Flowers utterly undermine Alter’s claim.
Many have made the general point that Clinton’s reputation for womanizing was well known. But Alter goes much further when he writes that voters elected Clinton in 1992 “even though they knew he had told Gennifer Flowers to lie about their affair.” Not only is this questionable as a general statement, but it implies that the Flowers affair was thoroughly covered at the time. A review of the 1992 Newsweek coverage shows that, although Alter covered the New Hampshire primary race and was in a position to reveal to Newsweek’s millions of readers that Clinton had “told Gennifer Flowers to lie about their affair,” he did no such thing. On the contrary, Alter, like most of his mainstream media colleagues, trashed Flowers for daring to challenge Clinton’s version of reality and neglected to report serious public wrongdoing by the candidate.
In comparison to Alter’s coverage of the Flowers story, the Star articles today are a revelation. For it turns out that the secret of that affair is that it, too, was not “just about sex.” Despite the incessant, seemingly exhaustive coverage of the Lewinsky scandal this year, it is surprising how little attention has been paid to the nonsexual elements of the Flowers story, details that eerily foreshadowed the events of 1998.
Like Monica, Gennifer Flowers pressured Clinton into securing her a taxpayer-supported job. (The nervy intern, of course, turned down her job offer at the United Nations.) As he did with Monica, Clinton aggressively coached Flowers to lie not only to the press about their affair, but also to an official state tribunal investigating whether improper influence was involved in her securing the job. And like our present scandal, the Flowers story was recorded. Taped conversations hold evidence that Clinton’s involvement with Flowers went beyond slap and tickle to cover significant abuses of his official powers. In the Flowers story, Clinton’s hidden machinations had third-party victims, namely Charlette Perry, and Arkansas state employee who was denied justice and cheated out of her day in court.
In capsule form here is the story, according to Flowers: In late 1991, while he was running for president, Clinton was also busily engaged in an attempt to buy her silence by providing her with a full-time state job. In the Star and in her 1995 memoir, Flowers reveals that she prodded Clinton into action by telling him that she was thinking about suing a local station that was airing rumors of their affair because she needed the money. (Shades of Monica threatening to tell her parents why she was not returning to the White House.) Candidate Clinton took the hint with alacrity. He arranged a job for her on the Arkansas Board of Review, an administrative position for which the sometime cabaret singer was neither suited nor qualified. A glitch soon developed, however, when an African-American woman named Charlette Perry, who had been promised the position, was displaced by Flowers. Perry filed a grievance with a state agency. The grievance board took testimony and found in Perry’s favor. But a Clinton appointee then reversed the grievance board’s findings. Flowers was reinstated and Perry was required to report to her.
On audiotapes Flowers secretly made late in 1991, (after Clinton’s announcement that he would run for president and a short time before the story broke), there is evidence that Clinton was indeed a full partner in this corrupt episode, just as Flowers claims. He is heard repeatedly being filled in by her on the details of the grievance process. At one point, she describes the lies she told the review board concerning how she first heard about the job opening. “Good for you,” responds Arkansas’s chief law enforcement officer. Then there is the following exchange:
FLOWERS: The only thing that concerns me at this point is the State job.
CLINTON: Yeah, I’ve never thought about that but as long as you say you’ve just been looking for one. . . . If they ever ask if you talked to me about if you can just say no.
Surely this remarkable misuse of state employment, with its echoes of the Wayne Hays/Elizabeth Ray affair back in 1976, merited at least a mention in the coverage of candidate Clinton. Much of it is on the record, and it is hardly a matter of private behavior. Of course, many of Flowers’s actions, like Monica Lewinsky’s, reflected as poorly on her as they did on Clinton. And, yes, Flowers’s acceptance of a large amount of money for the Star lessened her credibility. But the story she told was an eyewitness account, one that abounded in specifics that gave it a ring of truth and was backed up in crucial detail by that omnipresent evidentiary trump card, audiotape.
So how did Jonathan Alter, who now argues that citizens had fair warning of Clinton’s character from coverage of the Flowers affair, handle this story? His entire journalistic response to the scandal consists of two columns and one lead story. The first column appeared on January 27, 1992, when the story was breaking. In it he bemoaned the airing of the sex charges, wrote that they “seem bogus” and that both Clintons had denied them. To be fair to Alter, details were still sketchy at this point, so his was an interpretation honorable people might draw. Not so honorably, in the same column, Alter issued what sounded like a threat under the hypocritical guise of predicting one. “GOP operatives . . . examine bedsheets at their peril,” he threatened peevishly. “If they insist on dwelling on the matter, equally unsubstantiated rumors about an old George Bush affair might resurface.” Might resurface? This tactic would be underhanded for a political operative; for a political reporter who poses as a media watchdog, it is astonishing.
A week after he first addressed the scandal in his column, Alter wrote Newsweek’s lead story on the scandal, which appeared in the February 3 issue. He addressed the scandal a final time in another column two weeks later, after all of Flowers’s accusations had been leveled. (The intervening week’s abject truckling was ably handled by Eleanor Clift.) Not one word appears under his byline about the state job or on the manipulations of the grievance review process or on the taped admissions of Clinton’s secret collusion to deprive Perry of her rights. Nothing, zero, zilch. Nothing about them appears elsewhere in Newsweek, either.
So what exactly did Alter write? “The [Star] article is riddled with inaccuracies,” he announced in his lead story, quickly adding that both Clintons “denounced it.” That this was something different from the “denial” of the previous week was surely lost on readers in that dawn of ClintonSpeak. Alter went on to bemoan the scandal itself, characterizing it inelegantly as a “stinking mess” that deserved to be dismissed. Throughout he gave the false impression that Flowers’s charges never touched on public corruption. He did warn that “If Clinton is found to have lied about the double life that Flowers alleges, he is in deep trouble.” But newshound Alter never found the scent on that trail. Instead, he trashed Flowers, giving over a third of his lead story to breathless attacks on the minutiae of her resume. (Does she claim to have toured widely as a singer for Roy Clark’s backup band? Well, not so fast — others say she exaggerates!) Despite evidence of serious wrongdoing by a leading presidential candidate, Alter never got around to warning the public about Clinton.
Since the decline of party bosses and the smoke-filled room, the campaign gauntlet and the scrutiny of a skeptical press were supposed to vet candidates, rooting out the problems that might otherwise surface only after it’s too late. In hindsight, of course, the breakdown of this monitory function in the case of Clinton is glaringly, embarrassingly obvious. Jonathan Alter dramatically botched his first draft of history. He now compounds the journalistic travesty by arguing that people were fully informed back then. But, what they got back then from his pen was little better than a whitewash.
That first column on the Flowers affair appeared exactly six years before the Great Lewinsky Finger Wag of January 26, 1998. After the smear against Bush, Alter went on to declare that Gary Hart had “gotten what he deserved” in 1988 for his “recklessness” with Donna Rice, before airily dismissing the pertinence of Clinton’s wrongdoing, if any. In a classic sentence that combined tanking for Clinton with whatever is the opposite of prescience, Alter concluded, “No one has explained why, in Clinton’s case, any of this is relevant to how he would conduct himself as president.”
J. P. McGrath is a writer and editor for a New York publisher.
