Secrets of the Clinton Spectacle

A five-step program for surviving endless scandal.

Charles Paul Freund from the April 2000 issue

(Page 2 of 4)

Step 2. You Don’t Feed a Bad Story

The foremost piece of scandal wisdom in Washington, at least since Watergate, has been to "get it behind you." That is, you must forestall a long and damaging series of negative stories that will distract and weaken you. To do so, you must concede that damaging reports about your administration’s actions may contain at least some truth, and that your associates or appointees may have behaved improperly in some matter (though without your knowledge, and no doubt for mitigating reasons). Rather than attempt a futile cover-up, you must move quickly to make available whatever pertinent documents you have collected and announce an internal investigation. Eventually you fire somebody, though with regret at having to lose a dedicated public servant, and announce that the matter is closed. Then, you "move on."

The Clinton strategy has been exactly the opposite of this. You "move on" first and disclose later (and only then if you have to as a point of law). Clinton has stonewalled everything. He has admitted nothing (except in the most dire extremes), released no information in a timely manner, and investigated nothing. The case of the FBI files remains a classic example.

At least 900 raw FBI files containing personal information managed to find their way into the White House during the first Clinton term, in contravention of privacy law and basic decency. How did this happen? Clinton’s prevailing and entirely useless statement on the matter is that it was a "bureaucratic snafu." Who was responsible for it, and why? The White House has shown no interest in answering that question, though it did suggest, without offering any evidence, that it was the fault of the Secret Service. One Secret Service employee has termed that an impossibility, and there the matter rests.

In the meantime, Craig Livingston, a former bar bouncer who sometimes harassed George Bush on the campaign trail by dressing up in a chicken suit, disappeared from his job handling White House security. Who hired him and to whom did he answer? Who knows? What was the sequence of events that brought hundreds of raw FBI files into the White House? Who knows? To what use were they put? Who knows?

The Clinton calculation has been that it is better to have many unresolved and unproven suspicions hanging over the White House than to admit to a single impropriety. His taped remarks to Gennifer Flowers, made when he was Arkansas governor, "If they haven’t got pictures, they can’t prove anything," are a reasonable abstract of his governing philosophy.

Among the most tantalizing mysteries of the Clinton years is the lengths to which the president may have gone in order to shut a story down. What was the nature of the lucrative "consulting" contracts awarded to Webster Hubbell by the Lippo Group and others? If this was more than hush money, then what kind of consulting work did Hubbell do? Kenneth Starr was reportedly investigating these contracts, but we still don’t know anything about them. And what about the appalling suggestions that a private-eye "goon squad" was actively intimidating women who may have had damaging information about Clinton? Kathleen Willey, for example, reported numerous incidents of intimidation, some since confirmed. If such a goon squad was indeed actively threatening women, then Clinton’s presidency will have missed "greatness" by a considerable distance.

At any rate, Clinton has admitted to nothing (except, in the case of Hubbell’s Lippo contracts, reading about them in the press). Admission would validate discovery, potentially leading to more troublesome stories. Clinton would risk losing control. Leave a story unresolved, refuse to feed it, and the chances are pretty good that it will become yesterday’s news, especially if you are the president, and have the power to shape front pages by creating counter-news of your own.

Clinton certainly didn’t win every such bet. He lost control of the Paula Jones story, which led eventually to the Lewinsky scandal, which wasted his second term and the whole country’s and the whole world’s time. Clinton did eventually gain control of the impeachment melodrama that emerged from his Jones/Lewinsky problems, and since the whole point of his presidency had by then become survival, he won that bet, too.

Step 3. Stories Are About People

Until Clinton, major White House scandals were usually about process. News coverage of the Iran-Contra and Watergate scandals focused on alleged violations of the law. Only eventually did the characters and motives of participants–especially White House participants–become part of the larger narrative. For example, the detail that John Erlichmann was a mean son of a bitch emerged relatively late in the Watergate story, once the story was already full-blown. What mattered as the scandals took their original shape were not the characters of Erlichmann or John Dean or Oliver North; it was what they did.

That has hardly been the case under Clinton. This White House has responded to every major problem by introducing the character of its critics or opponents–and even its own victims–at the first opportunity, impugning those characters, and questioning motives. To the degree that it could, using allies in Congress and the press or acting directly, it has turned scandal narratives into character melodramas.

The major example of this reflex was the regular slandering of Kenneth Starr as a sex-obsessed maniac. But Starr had plenty of company; Clinton and his allies have tried to smear everybody whom they perceive as a threat. Gennifer Flowers was characterized as a gold-digging slut. Monica Lewinsky was characterized as a nutty stalker. Billy Dale of the White House Travel Office was falsely characterized as personally dishonest. Linda Tripp, thanks to a New Yorker story, was falsely characterized as a felon. Kathleen Willey was characterized as a delusional liar. Paula Jones was infamously characterized as trailer-park trash. UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, who questioned the administration’s resolve to rid Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, was characterized as a petty man jealous of his superiors’ limousine perks. House Republicans were characterized as sexual McCarthyites attempting a political coup. Of course, the entire community of Clinton critics was notoriously characterized by Hillary Rodham Clinton herself as "a vast right-wing conspiracy."

This is actually the centerpiece of the Clinton strategy of clogging Washington’s scandal machinery: Blunt every threatening story by infusing it with self-serving elements that subsequent press coverage will necessarily include. Hillary’s accusation of conspiracy, made in the course of an NBC "interview" conducted by a supine Matt Lauer, was both desperate and ludicrous, and it is likely that almost everyone in the press (and in the White House, too) saw it in just those terms. Yet in the wake of Hillary’s NBC appearance, most news-related talk shows devoted at least some time to absurd exchanges around the topic, "Is there a vast right-wing conspiracy?" At a minimum, Hillary’s statement bought time; at best, it introduced an explanation for her husband’s problems, one consistent with the rest of the Clinton scandal narrative: That he is the innocent victim, year in and year out, of dreadful people with evil motives and low characters.

Step 4. War Is the Biggest Story