Now and then, something happens that causes our
esteemed Washington
press corps to exhibit its collective posterior
to a wondering nation.
Such an event was the publication of Bill Clinton’s
biographical memoir,
"My Life." Following the extended funeral rites
for former President
Ronald Reagan, Clinton’s humongous Bildungsroman
left pundits
scrambling madly to master a new collective script.
"Bildungsroman" is
professor-speak for "10 pounds of ego in a 5-pound
sack." Nobody writes
an autobiography without a big ego. Not even
St. Augustine. But what was
Clinton’s real motive? Speaking on "NBC Nightly
News," Andrea Mitchell
(Mrs. Alan Greenspan) thought she knew. "All
Clinton may want to do,"
she opined, "is outsell his wife’s book, which
sold almost three million
copies worldwide." Time’s Margaret Carlson echoed
her on CNN’s "Capital
Gang." Where do they find them? Write a 972-page
book to show up your
wife? In my experience, when people pontificate
about the motives of
people they scarcely know, it’s their own motives
they display.
Apart from horses and high school guidance counselors,
it’d be hard to find an
equivalent group as consumed with status anxiety
as the Washington punditocracy.
Every news article and TV feature I saw regarding
Clinton’s book featured the
quote from Michiko Kakutani’s frontpage New York
Times review, "sloppy,
self-indulgent and often eye-crossingly dull."
Positive reviews by "Lonesome
Dove" author Larry McMurtry and Ben Franklin
biographer Walter Isaacson
got little play.
Interestingly, the Times ’ review neglected to
mention that Clinton spent many
pages deconstructing its own dreadfully bad Whitewater
reporting. Reading it,
he wrote, "felt like an outof-body experience."
Regarding the Times’ ?
The Washington Post’s and everybody else’s failure
to disclose the contents
of the Pillsbury Report, the eight-volume study
by a Republican law firm that
exonerated the Clintons of Whitewater wrongdoing
in December 1995—years
before independent counsel Kenneth Starr—Clinton
quoted my friend Lars-Erik
Nelson, the late New York Daily News columnist.
Nelson spent years in Moscow
covering the Soviet Union. "The secret verdict
is in," he wrote. "There was nothing
for the Clintons to hide.... [I] n a bizarre
reversal of those Stalin-era trials in which
innocent people were convicted in secret, the
President and the First Lady have
been publicly charged and secretly found innocent."
Yet Kakutani charges Clinton with "lies" about
"real estate." Challenged by Salon’s
Eric Boehlert to stipulate any, he says she never
called back. Times editor Bill Keller
alibied that the independent counsel’s Whitewater
report mentioned "inaccurate statements."
But if inaccurate statements are lies, the Times
printed even more lies about Whitewater
than "weapons of mass destruction." Indeed, had
editors heeded problems with its
"investigative" reporting during Clinton’s first
term when some of us started calling
attention to them, they might have spared themselves
a lot of trouble. Judith Miller’s
bad reporting about Iraq and Jeff Gerth’s about
Arkansas had certain basic
similarities: Both reporters went to places they
knew little about, put themselves into
the hands of con men with axes to grind and suppressed
dissenting voices eventually
proved correct.
As George Seldes observed, however, "the most
sacred cow of the press is the press
itself." Hence, The Washington Post, too, editorialized
that Clinton’s memoir "veers from
the nonfiction category" regarding Whitewater,
adding: "The tangled real estate investments...
merited investigation, and the inquiry produced
numerous convictions."
But in fact the Clintons made exactly one real
estate investment involving roughly $200,000,
repaid the loans in full and lost about $50,000.
None of the convictions Starr obtained
involved transactions to which they were a party.
Most had no relationship to their investment whatsoever.
Starr himself, apparently one of the unreliable
sources from whom reporters took dictation,
blandly assured a PBS interviewer that "very
few individuals who are caught up in the process
of criminal justice... walk out saying how much
I love the prosecutor." Cute, but Clinton’s
beef is more pointed. He produces a list of persons,
such as Kathleen Willey, whom he says
Starr rewarded for lying, and a list of others
like Susan Mc-Dougal who he says got indicted
for refusing to lie.
Self-serving? Maybe. But a Little Rock jury acquitted
McDougal, and a Virginia jury failed to
convict Julie Hiatt Steele on Willey’s say-so.
Unfortunately, Clinton’s book overlooks one of
Starr’s most stunning transgressions: convicting
Arkansas Gov. Jim Guy Tucker on the basis
of a repealed statute. Yes, you read correctly.
Starr destroyed the career of Tucker (a Clinton
rival, incidentally, to whom he says he apologized
for not having pardoned him) by using an
expired tax law. It took Tucker five years of
costly appeals to prove it, and it opens to further
appeal a second conviction of Tucker that Starr
obtained through the testimony of convicted
embezzler David Hale. But the courtiers of the
Washington press have no time for such trivialities.
Speculating about the Clintons’ marriage makes
better entertainment.
• Free-lance columnist Gene Lyons is a Little Rock author and recipient of the National Magazine Award.
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