DICK MORRIS


Bill Clinton was talking about his place in history with Dick Morris a few weeks ago in the Oval Office. They went over each of the presidents one by one, the Washington Post told us, to see where Clinton ranked. Clinton acknowledged with becoming modesty that he couldn’t be in the top tier — Lincoln, Wilson, FDR — without a major war. But he could tuck in right below, around Teddy Roosevelt, anti you can imagine Morris as they went down the roster: “Garfield? You smoke him, Mr. President. Hayes? Toast. Andrew Jackson? Couldn’t triangulate his way out of a paper bag.”

A president wouldn’t feel comfortable swirling this topic around in his mouth with his classy advisers. Panetta, Rubin, and Christopher would frown at such self-aggrandizement. But with the vulgar Dick Morris, a president could really open up, cast decorum aside, and let the self-absorption flow. Bill Clinton has that vulgar side. He’s the one who placed all those confiding middle-of-the-night phone calls to Gennifer Flowers. That’s why he’s an attention-craving politician and not a law professor somewhere.

Since the story came out about Morris’s dalliance with a hooker who listened in on his phone calls with Clinton, the commentariat has been puzzling over the strange relationship between the president and the slimeball. Gloria Borger likened Morris to Clinton’s bad habit, “as if he had begun smoking again.” Time said Morris had been “casting a mighty and mysterious spell on the presidency.” But maybe it’s not so mysterious. This is what happens to friendship when it happens between two men whose lives are suffused by politics.

Most major politicians — of either party — are not normal human beings. We normal people wend our way through the world aware we are one of millions. But major politicians dominate every room they enter and move as if their every gesture is being monitored by crowds. They have dozens or hundreds or even thousands of aides preening their queen-bee selves. Everything is coming at them, every flattery and every question and every attack, and it produces a kind of nearsightedness: Nothing really exists until it comes inside the zone of solipsism that surrounds them like a plasma bubble.

It takes an extraordinary aide to tend to the bubble of solipsism. These Morris-like figures transcend mere adviser status. Instead, they feed their own self-importance by sharing in the solipsism of their boss. He becomes their meaning, and politicians enjoy these alter egos because finally someone is as obsessed with the “Me” as they. Maybe more so.

Look at how Morris describes the way he was subsumed in the identity of Bill Clinton: “He shaped me into his tool,” Morris said to Eric Pooley of Time. “He looked at his life and saw what he needed, and I became that.” And then later, “I don’t believe there is a single issue where Bill Clinton and I disagree. I’m just like him.” Morris has called Clinton “the essence of my career.”

Morris is a man obsessed with Clinton’s public face, and foolishly careless when it came to his own. Here’s a man whose relationship to the president transcended the normal White House structure and transcended normal professionalism, to the dismay of the White House chief of staff. No normal adviser would write exclusive briefing books for the president in which he criticized the other advisers. Morris did. Morris was willing to have 80 percent of the White House staff hate him so long as he could have this bond with the president.

In Israel, I used to dine with an aide who plays a Dick Morris-like role to Ariel Sharon. His entire conversation consisted of stories and observations about Sharon, so that after a while, if you yourself were not Sharon-obsessed, your eyes teared up out of boredom. It’s not a bit surprising that Morris couldn’t even have a relationship with a prostitute without making Bill Clinton a major part of it.

And it’s not surprising that Morris would harbor grandiose notions of sacrificing himself for his boss. “Even if this episode destroys me, I will have done one great thing in my life, which is to help this man get the chance to lead this country for another four years,” Morris told Time’s Walter Isaacson after the scandal broke. For the central message that such aides communicate to their bosses is that they, the patrons, are cosmically important — a focal point of history, worth the sacrifice of lesser mortals.

In the world of Morris enthusiasms, every Clinton election is a historic election. Clinton is not just a politician, he is “the end product of the debate between Democrats and Republicans this century.” Every compromise is grandly dressed up as a “Hegelian synthesis.” Speeches are not just words; they are epoch-making. In the Isaacson interview, Morris said of Gore’s convention-speech story about his sister: “In that four minutes he probably saved hundreds of thousands of lives.” Vice presidents and even presidents aren’t actually that powerful. But if you were president, wouldn’t you occasionally like to hear someone tell you that you were?

Massachusetts governor William Weld, a former Morris client, gave Time a beautiful description of how Morris makes his politicians feel: “He sings to me. Strings go p-ling in my thoracic cavity. He finds boogie men and sets them up and knocks them down.”

Politicians are often surrounded by such lowlife hangers-on and amoralists. Creeps don’t make a politician’s skin crawl because their creepiness just doesn’t penetrate his zone of solipsism. Clinton supposedly knew Morris had no character, but what that meant wasn’t real to him until Morris upstaged him on the cover of Time four days before the world found out that the Star had photographs and tapes of Morris and his hooker at the Jefferson Hotel. When Clinton discovered that Morris was going to be portrayed as his ” brain,” he reportedly hit the roof and demanded Morris call Isaacson and get himself off the cover. Finally, Morris’s weaknesses penetrated Clinton’s zone of solipsism.

When Clinton was told about the Star expose, he supposedly looked up for a second and then continued working on his convention speech. An intimate of 20 years immolates himself, and Clinton reacts as coolly as if somebody told him rain was coming. This suggests that Clinton immediately insulated himself from Morris, who had become a problem and no longer an asset.

The manner in which Clinton appears to have cut Morris off is reminiscent of the way Henry V cut off Falstaff at the conclusion of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part II (“I know thee not, old man,” Falstaff’s former buddy Prince Hal tells him upon assuming the crown). Morris is no Falstaff, but the common thread is that political leaders subordinate things like friendship and normal human relationships to raison d’etat. Shakespeare emphasized the friendlessness of the king, and friendlessness is a common trait among many recent presidents, good and bad. Who was Reagan’s close friend? Who was Carter’s? Who is Dole’s? The zone of solipsism prevents such natural relations.

Morris, of course, is himself thoroughly politicized. He has turned his own marriage into a grotesquerie in order to save his political skin, posing for a “homey” dinner table picture in Time with his wife Eileen McGann, a photo in which they look like a couple of wax figures contemplating suicide. His wife’s statement — “I’m concerned with helping Dick get through this. I think he will. He has great survival instincts ever since being born prematurely at 2 1/2 lbs.” — is like a focus-group-tested paean to adulterers.

And judging by the interviews he’s given, even Morris’s devotion to Clinton can’t really be called friendship or sympathy, since he admires his own role in forming Clinton more than he admires Clinton as a person. The most amazing characteristic in Morris’s post-disgrace interviews in Time and the New York Times is his pride of ownership in this political entity called Bill Clinton. He describes the Clinton campaign as a joint Morris/Clinton exercise: “We decided, on my urging, that we would lead into the convention with a lot of bill signings . . .” Any normal aide would say “The president decided . . . ”

Morris says it was his idea to make the first night of the Democratic convention in Chicago non-political, with Christopher Reeve and Sarah Brady: ” The president himself was quizzical, but I called him every morning on his vacation, and he said that if I thought it would work, we should do it.” Morris says he wrote Clinton’s convention speech while the president was distracted on the train trip that preceded the convention: “I would give the speech as it came to my mind, and people would pounce on it and edit it as we went along. . . . The speech we gave was almost word for word the one we drafted for him.” In his letter of resignation, Morris used the word “I” 13 times and took credit for preventing a landslide Clinton defeat. Maybe he was right. Without Morris, Clinton probably wouldn’t have agreed to a balanced budget, wouldn’t have signed the welfare-reform bill, and the political landscape would have looked very different.

What’s striking about this bizarre chain of events — from the call girl eavesdropping on the president, to the wife image-buffing the adulterer, to the president and first lady making condolence calls to the disgraced spinner who betrayed them — is that we now have a politico-media aristocracy every bit as removed from natural human traits as Versailles-bound aristocrats were in 18th-century France. We think it strange that French aristocrats would avidly seek the honor of being present for the Sun King’s defecation, but isn’t it equally odd that we have these teams of guru spinners and image crafters all tending to the media emanations of one man? How could a person in the center of this hive of furious attention not develop into a solipsistic entity?

And how could a totally politicized consultant in this atmosphere not devolve into an unnatural creature, beyond shame and plausibility? Commit adultery, betray your president, get on the cover of Time in consecutive weeks, sign a book deal, negotiate to become an analyst for TV networks . . . Does anyone doubt that Dick Morris will go on and on? Does anyone doubt that he will be back, after a decent interval, at his Sun King’s side?


By David Brooks

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