Well, that of course depends on the needs of the hour, and the requirements of a “New Democrat.” Most nauseating, in Mr. Frady’s account, was the lip-biting conduct of Governor Clinton himself. At all times, he pretended—to Rector’s lawyer Jeff Rosenzweig and to others who managed to reach him in the closing moments—that this was a very painful moment for him personally. But that same affectation exposed itself when he received a telephone call from his friend Carolyn Staley, director of the Governor’s Commission on Adult Literacy. Hearing on the radio that Rector’s execution was stalled by the snag of finding a usable vein, she telephoned her friend Bill and he called her back and—well, I’ll let Mr. Frady tell it:
She told him, “I just wanted to let you know that I’m praying for you about the execution tonight,” and he replied in a groan, “It’s just awful. Just terrible, terrible.” As she recalls it now, “I heard in his voice a self—a depth of anguish—I’d never, never heard in him before.” She then told him, “You know, he’s not even dead yet.” “What?” she remembers him exclaiming. “What?” From his startlement, it was obvious to her that the conference in which he had been absorbed had not exactly been a “blow by blow” account of Rector’s fate… Staley then told him, “Bill, I’m so sorry. We’ve had two executions this week, haven’t we.” She meant the Flowers allegations. “He just groaned,” she remembers, and they moved on to discussing that topic. Ultimately, she says, the conversation wound up “much more about the Gennifer Flowers matter” than about what was happening to Rector at that moment down at Cummins.
Easy to believe. One is compelled to acknowledge the versatility, and the quick-change between ostentatious pain-feeling and everyday political instinct. It was during those same closing moments that Clinton and his spouse decided on their celebrated 60 Minutes strategy, and left Little Rock refreshed for a round of campaign and fund-raising appearances where the “character question” would be conveniently limited to a choice between a dizzy blonde and a “strong woman.” This moment deserves to be remembered for a number of reasons: first because it introduces a Clintonian mannerism of faux “concern” that has since become tediously familiar, second because it illuminates his later attitude toward matters racial, and matters penal, and third because it marks the first of many times that Clinton would deliberately opt for death as a means of distraction from sex.
I followed Clinton from New Hampshire to Arkansas to California to New York that season, noticing with subdued admiration the ways in which his fans and staffers would recommend him in private. “He’s already won the two invisible primaries,” one was often told by the wised-up, “the money primary and the polling primary.” This was true enough; the “donor community” had adopted him early, and the pundits likewise conferred the charismatic title of “front-runner” before a single New Hampshire ballot had been cast. Clinton actually lost that primary, which pundits and other political chin-pullers had hitherto described as a sine qua non, but it was then decided, in the circles that “counted,” that this didn’t count this time. Most amazing though, was the frequently heard observation that Clinton, as a Southerner, “understood black people.” This extraordinary piece of condescension was convertible currency, as it turned out, because of the jolt delivered to consensus by the disorders in Los Angeles. Nervous voters everywhere found Bush’s response to be insufficiently fuzzy. Clinton, it was widely assumed, would be more “caring” and “healing.” The impression—again “subliminal”—helped him considerably. But an impression it was. Clinton gave the City of the Angels a wide berth, and limited his comments to some platitudes, taken from the playbook of neoconservatism, about the “culture of poverty” in South Central.
That very idiom—naturally concerned yet nonetheless strict—was to become the substratum of his now-celebrated “comfort level” with black Americans while in office. Obviously on good personal terms with Vernon Jordan and Ron Brown and Mike Espy (one of them a conduit to Pamela Harriman’s opulent PAC, one of them the genius fund-extorter of the Democratic National Committee, and one of them a long-time friend of Tyson Foods), Clinton also rocked to Aretha Franklin on the Mall during his inauguration and invited Maya Angelou to deliver a piece of doggerel poetry at the ceremony itself. Well versed in the cant of Southern Baptist rhetorical uplift, the new president was capable of working the crowd at black church services, just as, infinitely protean in devotional matters, he never looked out of place standing next to Billy Graham or Mother Teresa. However, there were four occasions when push, to employ an old political cliche, came to shove.
The first of these moments took place when Clinton proposed Dr. Lani Guinier to head the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department. Dr. Guinier was and is a legal scholar of some distinction. She and her husband had invited the Clintons to their wedding, and had helped introduce them to polite society on Martha’s Vineyard. She had helped calm Jesse Jackson and other black leaders after Clinton had staged the Sister Souljah headline grabber. (“You got your story,” Jackson had crisply told George Stephanopoulos and Paul Begala as he left the platform on that occasion.) However, in essays for the Yale Law Review and other journals, Dr. Guinier had made the unpardonable mistake of thinking aloud about proportional representation in Dixie. After being fed a misleading attack circulated by Abigail Thernstrom, a neoconservative opponent of affirmative action, the Republican Right pounced, and arraigned her as a “Quota Queen” opposed to majority—or at any rate majoritarian—rule. This was a slander. Dr. Guinier had expressed her opposition to quotas on principle, and had actually written on the need for electoral “weighting” arrangements to protect the white minority in South Africa. She was also in the process of making an excellent impression on the Republican senators who had originally believed the first-draft briefing papers circulated by extremists about her. None of this prevented Clinton’s peremptory withdrawal, in June 1993, of her nomination:
At the time of the nomination, I had not read her writings. I wish I had. The problem is that this battle will be waged based on her academic writings. And I cannot fight a battle that I know is divisive, that is an uphill battle, that is distracting to the country, if I do not believe in the ground of the battle. That is the only problem.
These were early days, and the delight of parsing a Clinton paragraph had not yet attained to the joy it has since become. Still, it is striking to note that Clinton did not “believe in the ground of the battle.” The ground of the battle, according to him, was “her academic writings.” And these awkward texts he had, on his own admission, “not read.” There was, in the tenses, a very slight suggestion that he might have read them since the nomination, in which case he could have discerned for himself, as a Yale Law graduate and a member of the bar, that what was being said about his friend was literally and figuratively untrue. But even that suggestion was overshadowed by a declared refusal to involve himself with anything that was “divisive,” or that might involve “an uphill battle,” or that could “distract the country.” And this reluctance in turn would seem to exclude any very staunch commitment to racial equality, let alone to facing down “big husky rednecks” in the Deep South, as six-or-was-it-nine-year-old Bill had once known how to do.
The grace note was left to Mrs. Clinton, who happened to pass by Dr. Guinier in a corridor just as the news of the administration’s retreat was sinking in. Waving to her old friend without breaking stride, the First Lady managed to blurt the words “Hey kiddo!” adding ten paces later that she was “half an hour late for a luncheon” before pushing on and leaving her to reflect. A final insult was also delivered, and recorded in Dr. Guinier’s extremely literate and persuasive memoir, Lift Every Voice:
We had tried to get Vernon Jordan to come. Vernon had told me he could be helpful with Senator Alan Simpson. During a relaxed, one-on-one meeting in his law office, Vernon had offered to meet or call Simpson on my behalf should that become necessary. When Vernon was subsequently asked to follow up with Simpson, he reportedly s
aid, “I don’t do that kind of thing.”
Oh but he does, he does… When the rich and spoiled daughters of donors and fund-raisers are given affirmative-action jobs at the White House, Mr. Jordan can’t do enough of that kind of thing.
White House aversion to the “divisive” may have been genuine in its own terms, because the important civil rights post at Justice went unfilled for more than twelve months (nothing divisive about that, one is compelled to notice) before going to Deval Patrick. Mr. Patrick, who might without unfairness be described as one of the less prominent members of the administration, found himself short of “access” and “input” and other crucial resources. In January 1995, he decided not to accompany Mr. Clinton to Dr. King’s birthplace in Atlanta for the annual birthday commemoration. He had discovered that the president’s speech would not allude to civil rights, but would take the form of a stern lecture on good behavior to young black men. Mr. Patrick had failed to divine Mr. Clinton’s original and essential “message,” dating back to his days at the Democratic Leadership Council: It is time for some people in society to set a good example of moral continence, industry, and thrift. Since this admonition is not going to be delivered to the Fanjuls, or to Roger Tamraz, or to the Hollywood “benefit nights,” it may as well be orated, with suitable notice for the networks, to a captive audience of another sort. (In The Importance of Being Earnest, Algernon languidly observes that if the lower orders will not set an example, it is difficult to see the point of them.)
Clinton’s next test of loyalty to black friends and colleagues involved his surgeon-general, Dr. Joycelyn Elders. Never popular with the phalanx that concentrated around the “Contract With America,” this lady was to make two mistakes. Charged with responsibility for matters of public health, she asked whether it might be wise to lift the prohibition, not of soft narcotics, but on any debate about decriminalizing them. The striking thing about Mr. Clinton’s rapid response was not his stony opposition to decriminalization but his vehement opposition to the merest mention of the topic. It was the debate, not the proposal, that he forbade. In effect, he told his surgeon-general to shut up. That was, had she but known how to recognize it, her “first strike.” Nor was she allowed three. At another public forum, where the subject was sexual well-being among American teenagers, Dr. Elders proposed an open discussion of masturbation, as well as of the existing choice between latex sheaths and abstinence. The presidential firing that followed was swift and peremptory. It was as if the good doctor had publicly defiled the temple of her own body. One feels almost laughably heavy-footed in pointing out that Mrs. Clinton’s prim little book, It Takes a Village, proposes sexual abstinence for the young, and that the president was earnestly seconding this very proposal while using an impressionable intern as the physical rather than moral equivalent of a blow-up doll.
The third instance—one exempts altogether the “National Initiative” of conversation about race and racism, which withered on the vine and lost the president’s attention altogether—concerns Peter and Marian Wright Edelman. With a near peerless record in the civil rights movement (it was Marian Wright Edelman who first introduced Hillary Clinton to Vernon Jordan), this couple had worked unstintingly for Democratic liberalism and in the conviction that children should not suffer for the blunders or crimes or sheer failures of their parents. By 1996, with welfarism and welfare mothers the main, if not sole, political culprits in a social landscape rife with every other kind of depredation, this simple concept seemed as sinister as Sweden—almost as sinister as socialism itself. Going further than any Republican president had ever dared venture, and prompted every day by Dick Morris, who considered this boldness to be the essence of triangulation, Clinton proposed that a sixty-year federal commitment to children in poverty be scrapped, and the whole problem be referred to the budget-conscious fifty states. A provision in the bill mandated that if a woman would not or could not give the name of her child’s father, or objected to this invasion of her privacy, she could be stricken from the welfare rolls.
Shortly after the November elections, I was given an eyewitness account of the White House conclave at which the Clintonoid inner circle made its decision to sign the welfare bill. Not all the positions taken at this “defining” meeting were predictable: the sternest and longest holdout against the act was mounted by Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, though I suppose he did have reasons of New York exceptionalism for taking this stand. Another detail that my informant let fall is worth “sharing.” There was, he said, one argument that carried no weight in the room. This was the view, put forward by Mr. Morris, that failure to sign the bill would result in a Republican victory in November. “Dick won,” he said, “but not because he persuaded anyone of that.”
On September 11, Peter Edelman, after long service at the Department of Health and Human Services, had tendered his resignation. This gave him the distinction, along with two colleagues who resigned at the same time and for the same reasons, of being the only example of a departure on principle from either Clinton administration. Edelman resigned, not just because of the policy decision itself, but because of the extreme cynicism that lay behind it.
At about the same time, Dick Morris was caught by a tabloid newspaper in the Jefferson Hotel, wasting his substance (and perhaps other people’s too) with harlots and high living. No relativist words about privacy or consenting adults were spoken on this occasion: it was an election season, after all, and the president dropped him from the team without compunction. But in compensation, he and his wife publicly lamented Mr. Morris’s fate, and wished him back very soon (and got him back even sooner, though without advising anybody of the fact). I chanced to run into Peter Edelman at about the same time, and asked him out of curiosity: “Did you get any calls from Bill or Hillary asking you to stay, or saying they’re sorry you went?” No, Mr. Edelman had not. Like Lani Guinier, who never heard from her old friends the Clintons again (apart from a machine-generated Christmas card), he had been triangulated out of political existence.
Mike Espy, another black Clinton appointment, was secretary for agriculture until he was accused of taking favors and gratuities from the agribusiness interests he was supposed to regulate and supervise. An application from the special prosecutor to investigate the whole pattern of political donations from Don Tyson and Tyson Foods was immediately rejected by Attorney General Janet Reno, a biddable mediocrity whose tenure at the Justice Department was itself something of a scandal. As a consequence, the evidence against Espy became rather a matter of nickels and dimes, and he was eventually acquitted. With the acquittal secure, Clinton found the courage to offer congratulations. But Mr. Espy was not as impressed as he might have been by this display of summer-soldier solidarity. He had, after all, been fired from the Cabinet as soon as the charges against him had been made. And Clinton had delegated the firing to his chief of staff Leon Panetta, afterward keeping his distance entirely. Mr. Espy could have consoled himself on one score, however. There could be no question of any discrimination in his case. His boss would always abandon a friend in trouble, regardless of race, color, or creed. Only men like Webster Hubbell received continued, solicitous attention, at least in the period elapsing between their indictments and the expiry of the statute of limitations.
During the 1990 midterm elections, the most blatantly racist electoral appeal was offered by Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina. Nobody who was anywhere near a liberal mailing list between the years 1980 and 1996 could have avoided a solicitation from various Democrat-sponsored coalitions against “The New Right’s Prince of Darkness.” By hauling up buckets of sludge from the deepest wells of the racist and fundamentalist Old Confederacy, Helms had made himself the most visible and unapologetic target. But his last-ditch TV advertisement of 1994 became the standard by which the liberals measured cynicism. On screen, a pair of work-worn white hands were seen opening an envelope, and then sadly crumpling the enclosed missive. “You needed that job,” said the sorrowful voice-over
, “but it had to go to a minority.” But I have found that most liberals are still shocked to hear that the author of the “white hands” TV incitement was—Dick Morris.
They have no right to be shocked. By late 1998, it was being openly said in Democratic and liberal quarters that the wronged President Clinton was being lynched, yes, just as Clarence Thomas had once been lynched, by a posse of big and husky rednecks. On the floor of the House, with the evident approval of the Democratic leadership, Maxine Waters said that the defense of this wronged man was the moral equivalent of the fight against slavery and segregation. During the Senate trial, the White House fielded a young black woman attorney, Cheryl Mills, to make essentially the same point. And when the trial managers failed to call the president’s secretary Betty Currie, the race card was played yet again. Clinton’s spinners successfully spread the word that the senators feared to question a shy and dignified black lady (whose life, incidentally, had been made a hell of lawyer’s bills by the actions of her boss) lest she break down and cry. There was something brilliantly sordid about this last innuendo: nobody knew better than the White House that a private deal had been made between senators Lott and Daschle to restrict the number of witnesses to three. And these potentates had decided that Sidney Blumenthal was a better test of Clinton’s human shield than a fragile secretary.