Bill Clinton's Exit Interviews

The outgoing president enters his final spin cycle.

Nick Gillespie from the February 2001 issue

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Let one more instance stand in for the rest: In September, the president expressed shock and disappointment at the way the government denied Los Alamos’ Wen Ho Lee due process during the scientist’s nine months of solitary confinement. "[The case] should be disturbing to the American people," Clinton told reporters after Lee was released. "We ought not to keep people in jail without bail unless there’s some real profound reason."

Indeed, what should be especially disturbing is a chief executive who admitted that he "always had reservations" about denying Lee bail but did nothing about the way his Justice Department pursued the case. More disturbing still: Three weeks after the president made his comments, he headlined a fundraiser in New Mexico for congressional hopeful John Kelly, the lead prosecutor in the Lee case.

This willingness to separate himself from his own administration may in the end be Clinton’s truly novel contribution to presidential politics; if this gesture does not exactly originate with Clinton, he is surely its master practitioner. (In the end, even Nixon, in his own fashion, copped to what his plumbers had been up to.) It is a powerful way of both taking and dodging responsibility for any given action or policy. It simultaneously blunts criticism and presumes assent. It casts manifest failings in political nerve as occasions for sympathy. It is, in short, a brilliant Machiavellian ploy.

"Whether I changed the presidency depends upon how other people conduct it," Clinton muses in his Esquire interview. Here’s hoping that this is one change the next president shuns.