Clinton Gets the Defenders He Deserves

Early on in A Vast Conspiracy, Jeffrey Toobin takes us to a May 5, 1994 conference call between Paula Jones’s attorney Gil Davis, and President Clinton’s lawyer, Bob Bennett:

"’I’ve talked to the president about this for hours and hours,’ Bennett said, ‘and this just didn’t happen. You have no case.’ The two men sparred inconclusively for a few minutes, and then Bennett raised the stakes. ‘Did you know there are naked photos of your client?’... Davis said he didn’t know about any naked photos, but he would be interested to see them if they existed. ... Then it was Davis’s turn to spring a surprise.

‘My client says your guy has a unique mark on his penis, and she can identify it.’

What followed was a considerable silence."

In this irresistable passage and several others throughout *A Vast Conspiracy*, Toobin perfectly captures the mixture of high drama and low farce that made the Clinton impeachment imbroglio such a guilty pleasure. Think Inherit the Wind meets Benny Hill. Toobin, the New Yorker reporter who chronicled the O.J. Simpson trial in the tightly paced bestseller The Run of His Life, seeks to repeat his success with this account of the Lewinsky Scandal.

Unfortunately, Toobin’s considerable skills as a narrator are undermined by his heavy ideological investment in defending Clinton. Time Magazine reporter Nina Burleigh famously remarked in the New York Observer, "I would be happy to give [Clinton] a blow job just to thank him for keeping abortion legal... American women should be lining up with their presidential kneepads on to show their gratitude for keeping the theocracy off our backs." Toobin, too, has packed his kneepads along with his reporter’s notebook, and the results are embarrassing.

Toobin sets the stage in the book’s Prologue, when he declares that "Clinton was, by comparison [with his enemies], the good guy in this struggle." At every turn, Toobin casts Clinton’s behavior in the most flattering light imaginable. Discussing Clinton’s videotaped grand jury testimony, Toobin burbles that "In a peculiar way, one could see the Clinton cared for Monica Lewinsky... there was, if not gallantry, a kind of affection as well." Of the president’s August 17, 1998 televised nonapology, the failure of which nearly drove Clinton from office, Toobin declares, "Clinton displayed on this evening the skills that made him the most extraordinary politician of his generation." Remember the White House prayer breakfast that took place shortly thereafter? At that event, Clinton, family Bible in hand, intoned: "As you might imagine, I have been on quite a journey these last few weeks to get to the end of this, to the rock-bottom truth of where I am and where we all are." Toobin weighs in on this as well:

"Clinton’s remarks—at once passionate, earnest, and humble—demonstrated a kind of eloquence rarely seen in American life." To the less star-struck among us, what they demonstrated is a kind of arrogance and self-absorption that borders on the pathological. Who the hell cared "where" the phony bastard was, and what could that possibly have to do with "where" the rest of us were?

But it gets worse. Toobin mangles the facts and the law in an attempt to clear his man of serious wrongdoing. Of Clinton’s attempt to get Monica Lewinsky to file a false affidavit in the Paula Jones case, Toobin says that it was "not even close" to obstruction of justice. He explains that Clinton could have been urging her to file "a truthful, if limited, affidavit that might have gotten her out of testifying in the Jones case." For instance, writes Toobin, "she could say that she had no evidence relating to sexual harassment." Yes, and that would surely stop the Jones lawyers from seeking to depose her. Does Toobin really believe this nonsense? Clearly, nothing short of a false affidavit—one denying sexual contact altogether—could avoid piquing the Jones lawyers’ interest and spurring a subpoena for Lewinsky. Just as clearly, that was the kind of affidavit Clinton encouraged her to file, and which she did file.

By the time Toobin gets to his discussion of the constitutional standard for impeachment, the screeching of Eleanor Clift rings in your ears. The president’s adversaries, Toobin writes, "were willing to trample all standards of fairness—not to mention the Constitution—in their effort to drive him from office." Toobin, of course, argues that Congress’s impeachment power can properly be invoked only where there is an abuse of official power. But historical practice in England and America never drew such a line. Nor could it. Those left-wing academics who, in an uncharacteristic attempt to divorce the personal and the political, tried to argue that impeachment was limited to grave abuses of political power, soon found themselves tripping over their own logic. My personal favorite was University of Chicago law professor Cass Sunstein, who suggested in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review that murder may not be an impeachable offense. No kidding: "a hard case" if committed for nonpolitical reasons. (Let’s hope that Our Bill hasn’t figured out that the Sunstein standard immunizes him from impeachment for rape, as well.)

What is it about Clinton, and what was it about the impeachment period, that inspired such acts of journalistic and academic self-debasement? Reporters like Toobin and professors like Sunstein peddled their credibility as cheaply as Monica’s virtue in an attempt to cover for a man who little deserves it. Why?

Well, for one thing, Clinton’s left-wing defenders perceived the entire episode as a politically driven attempt to "get" the President. Moreover, they associated that attempt with what they saw as moral Babbitry and conservative sexual repressiveness. Though their view was greatly exaggerated, it wasn’t entirely without foundation, as Toobin shows. In particular, Paula Jones’s second set of lawyers—conservative Christian activists connected with the Rutherford Institute-used the lawsuit as an excuse to troll through Clinton’s sexual past and expose him as an adulterous lecher. If Nina Burleigh’s would-be theocrats were anywhere to be found in the scandal, it was here. Interestingly, Toobin writes that "the Clinton team began to refer to their new adversaries... as the Branch Davidians." Maybe Jones’s lawyers are lucky they weren’t gassed and barbecued.

When, a year later, a significant part of the perjury article of impeachment revolved around where Clinton kept his hands during Monica’s ministrations, the president’s defenders were able to construct a narrative of right-wing prudery and inquisitorial moralism. Of course, believing in that narrative required a good deal of cognitive dissonance. For instance, the so-called "theocracy" wouldn’t have gotten far without legal "reforms" that the Clintonites backed: amorphous sexual harassment law and changes to the Federal Rules of Evidence pushed by feminists and signed by Clinton himself.

But no matter. The obvious personal venom with which many of Clinton’s enemies pursued him allowed the president’s defenders to feel like they were acting in the service of principle. They insisted that the cause was larger than the man (in this case, almost any cause is) and declared that they were fighting to preserve the separation of powers, to protect our Constitution from being trampled by a G.O.P. lynch mob.

But it’s hard to treat the posturing of Clinton’s defenders with anything other than contempt. If they really gave a toss about the Constitution or "destructive partisanship," they’d have switched sides when Clinton twice decided that foreign lives might justifiably be sacrificed to save his political viability. Clinton’s eve-of-impeachment decision to bomb Iraq came shortly after the president learned that he did not have the votes to prevail. In that, it was of a piece with August 1998’s "anti-terror" attacks on Sudan and Afghanistan, which came three days after the president’s grand jury testimony and in the midst of a media firestorm over his televised non-apology. If Toobin, Sunstein, et al. couldn’t find anything suspicious about that chronology, then I’ve got a bridge to the 21^st century I’d like to sell them.

Toobin can muster only a couple of oblique references to the biggest story of the impeachment crisis. He briefly mentions "controversy" over the president’s decision to bomb Iraq, clears his throat nervously, and then quickly resumes his narrative of a tragically flawed but good man hounded by moral zealots.

Toobin is not alone in focusing on the sex-and-celebrity related aspects of the impeachment scandal to the exclusion of Clinton’s gravest crimes against the moral law and the Constitution. The media as a whole has shown criminal disinterest in Clinton’s applied version of Clauswitz’s dictum that war is politics by other means. Since the end of impeachment, Monica’s contract with Weight Watchers and Linda Tripp’s facelift have consumed far more column-inches in major newspapers than the steadily accumulating evidence that the bombing of the El-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Sudan was utterly without justification.

The Washington Post, the paper made its mark with Watergate, did run a comprehensive, well-researched piece on the bombing of the El-Shifa factory. The article, which ran on July 25, 1999, made a sober and compelling case that the administration’s stated rationales for the missile attack could not withstand serious scrutiny. The plant did not, despite what Clinton claimed, manufacture nerve gas; it made painkillers and repackaged imported pharmaceuticals for resale in Sudan. Westerners intimately familiar with the plant, including a British engineer who served as technical manager during the plant’s construction, emphatically denied that it was used for the manufacture of chemical weapons. Independent tests conducted by the chair of the chemistry department at Boston University confirmed that no nerve-gas precursors were present in the soil around the factory. The CIA refused to release the sample it claims to have relied on. Nor did the plant’s owner, Salah Idris, have any connection whatever with Osama Bin Laden. Idris’s property had been destroyed-and his assets seized-on that pretext; however, when Idris filed suit, the U.S. government summarily issued an order unfreezing his assets, rather than have to come forward with its evidence in open court. The Post article closes with a quote from Milt Bearden, former CIA station chief in Sudan and a vociferous critic of the attack: "There’s something wrong here. This won’t go away."

All in all, the article was a fine piece of journalism. But it didn’t quite make the front page, or even the "A" section. Instead, it was relegated to the Post’s "Style" section. Sex and scandal on the front pages, presidential war crimes next to the funnies and the horoscopes. That’s "adversary" journalism in the Clinton era.

So, to recap: during the impeachment "crisis," President Clinton waged war and murdered powerless foreigners in order to serve his private political advantage. But to Jeffrey Toobin and his ideological compatriots in the academy and the establishment press, the real scandal is that Henry Hyde and Tom Delay are hypocritical, moralistic prigs. This president attracts the kind of defenders he deserves.