American Rhapsody

by Joe Eszterhas

  “Really?” Linda asked.

  “When I was in high school,” Monica said, “oh, this was like the most depressing time of my life. How depressing is that?”

  “Well,” Linda Tripp said, “you sure made up for it, dear.”

  Good evening, Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea. Let’s go to press! It was a million-megaton story. Bill Clinton was hip-deep in the Big Muddy now, under the Tallahatchie Bridge, gasping for air like Brian Jones.

  The Pentagon Papers hadn’t been as publicized as the Starr Report. Nixon’s incursion into Cambodia hadn’t gotten as much bad press as his semi-incursion into Monica. If the failure of Nixon’s Vietnamization policy hadn’t resulted in calls for Nixon’s resignation, then why was his masturbation prompting so many calls for his resignation? Nixon was guilty of aerial atrocities; all he’d done were oral sodomies. Nixon had had it easy. Well, yes, there was the war and there were all those demonstrations, but Nixon had all those orbitings and moon walks and Apollos and Saturn Fives and Surveyors. “I am not a crook” didn’t sound that bad in the context of “Houston, Tranquility Base here; the eagle has landed.”

  Bill Clinton had dodged the draft and now found himself the target of a television air war, tap-dancing around land mines on the slippery slopes of a slimy Ho Chi Minh trail, strafed, bombed, barraged by editorialists howling, “Resign! Resign! Resign!” Even Bob Dole had been drawn into the scandal. Dole, the lobbyist now that he always should have been, Monica’s next-door neighbor at the Watergate, was handing out doughnuts to the press camped outside, sharing the weekly supply he received for doing Dunkin’ Donut ads.

  “If you’re in big trouble over something,” Dick Morris had said to Bill Clinton before Dick’s own disgrace, before Dick’s preference for toes shared the same tabloid pages with Marv Albert’s werewolf imitation, “the best strategy is to distract ’em.” Or, as Harry Truman said, “If you can’t convince ’em, confuse ’em.”

  But how could Bill Clinton distract ’em or confuse ’em when the media Beast was feeding on this in its own gluttonous way—“All news all the time! Continuous twenty-four-hour-a-day coverage!” What could he throw the Beast so it would feed on something or someone else? What could the Beast possibly enjoy more than this feast of food so rich that ratings were skyrocketing even on Fox News?

  Searching for a distraction, his more pointy-headed aides argued for “a redefinition of the big picture, a reframing of historical context,” to make a case that there was nothing that was really unseemly or un-American or unpresidential or unique about Bill Clinton’s actions. Researchers turned into private eyes, snooping the history books and memoirs for anything that might be . . . relevant to this.

  George Washington was probably bisexual (irrelevant) . . . . Thomas Jefferson fathered a black child (bingo! jackpot! very relevant) . . . . Benjamin Franklin liked threesomes (maybe relevant) . . . . James Buchanan may have been gay (probably irrelevant) . . . . Warren Harding made love to a young mistress in the White House closet (so relevant), but Harding was such a corrupt sleazeball—Whitewater was not, was not Teapot Dome!—that any attempt to craft a Harding shield would only hurt . . . . FDR and his mistress Lucy Mercer, one of several, had a lot of oral sex (full-scale relevance alert!), but FDR was bound to a wheelchair, so oral sex was a near necessity . . . . LBJ said, “I get more pussy in twenty-four hours than Jack Kennedy got his entire life” (probably relevant), but LBJ was such a barnyard hick that drawing parallels between LBJ and Bill Clinton could boomerang . . . . JFK was a sex fiend (directly relevant, but, unfortunately, old news, gorged and gobbled by the Beast way too often to distract it from what was on the table now).

  Besides researchers turned into private eyes, veterans of more recent scandals were out there, too, tipping the White House to juicy morsels that might distract the Beast. They remembered the stripper Fanne Fox and octogenarian Arkansas congressman Wilbur Mills . . . nontyping secretary Elizabeth Ray and near-octogenarian Ohio congressman Wayne Hayes . . . Teddy Kennedy under the table at Sans Souci, plastered out of his mind, trying to force an unwilling waitress to . . . (Oh, not relevant! Sad-eyed old congressmen and fat old Teddy, the little brother who couldn’t, disgraced forever anyway for fatal cowardice at Chappaquiddick.)

  And Gerry Ford? Gerry Ford had had more problems with women than anyone, but no one understood why. Why did Squeaky Fromme want to kill him? Why did Sara Jane Moore want to kill him? And what about that seventy-seven-year-old woman who rammed the White House gates with her car, got arrested, got released, went home, got in her car, and rammed the gates again that same night? What was there about flatulent, pipe-smoking, mild-mannered Gerry Ford that made women want to kill him?

  Unfortunately, there was no riskless way to reframe the historical context. The history of American politics was an unswept minefield and rusted shrapnel posed the danger of tearing Bill Clinton’s head off. Besides that, the Beast was being savagely criticized by the soccer moms for feasting on all this garbage. To throw more maggoty food atop the table now would further enrage those moms . . . and then someone (Hillary?) had a brilliant idea. Feed the Beast a different taste to distract it—something sweet.

  Sweet? But what? What was sweet in this story? A small box of chocolates as payoff for phone sex and blow jobs? A last “Christmas kiss”? Sweet? No, no, Monica was the wrong woman to focus on. The right woman was Chelsea. And her mom and dad. A family in crisis. A family healing. A family forgiving. Give the Beast a soap opera, feed it schmaltz, play it some violins. How could the Beast not like that?

  It was beautiful! It was uplifting! The Beast gobbled it up . . . and so did we. It was sugar-coated breakfast cereal that snapped and popped in our mouths. Not for nothing had we become the sensitive, in-touch-with-real-feelings generation. The generation of communication, intervention, closure, and venting. We had designed ourselves, ever since the sixties, to buy this story. “Love is all you need,” the Beatles had said.

  And so, out of the detritus of cigar butts, we conjured for ourselves—at the Beast’s urging—a sappy, universal love story. He cheats. He’s sorry. He loves his wife. They love their daughter. Will mommy and their daughter forgive him? Stay tuned! “All news all the time! Continuous twenty-four-hour-a-day coverage!”

  We were torn away now from the Oval Office and Bill Clinton’s private office, the scene of the noncrime crime. We were watching a different show: The First Family in Crisis! We were away from XXX into PG country, away from Boogie Nights and safe with The American President or a nineties remake of Kramer vs. Kramer. Some of us got tears in our eyes. Oh, look at poor, brave Chelsea! Trying to carry on so heroically with her hellish schedule at Stanford after daddy’s screwed the pooch! Poor, poor Chelsea, even her nice, clean-cut, white-bread swim-star boyfriend dumped her because he didn’t want anything to do with someone whose father . . . Poor, poor Chelsea! People in the streets were dressed up as human cigars! Signs on overpasses screeched HONK IF HE SHOULD RESIGN! How could poor Chelsea possibly deal with this? Such a brave, noble, innocent, sweet young woman?

  And look at poor Hillary, her fate the fate of most of America’s women. Betrayed, humiliated, victimized! Oh, she thought she was so highfalutin for a while there, didn’t she? Wearing her fancy black coat with the silver Deco design into the grand jury hearing, even autographing her book for a juror, acting in general like hers didn’t stink . . . not anymore! Brought down off the throne now, just one of millions of cheated women now, one of us now. But how brave she was in the face of this smell. Noble. Crying behind her sunglasses. Because she . . . loved . . . him . . . and . . . he . . . loved . . . her! You could just tell . . . and they both loved their little girl and they’d love each other forever and live happily ever after and he’d never cheat again! The Beast was happy and so were we. We fell for it like Monica fell for him. Jesse Jackson and ministers everywhere waved their applause signs at us in case we had second thoughts: LOVE! HEALING! FORGIVENESS! NOT RESIGNATION! NO I
MPEACHMENT! FINISH OUT THE TERM!

  Yes, there were a few critics who said, Please! It’s horse manure! Tripe for the masses! Dick Morris’s distraction strategy at full throttle! . . . Morris had also said, “My job is to run the pump and the motors, not to fix the hole at the bottom of the boat” and “Polls are the ultimate master of the Western World” . . . but there was no doubt the strategy was working. Bill Clinton’s approval rating was sky-high and, now that she was off of her throne and one of us, now that she’d been humiliated, Hillary’s approval rating was sky-high, too. (Some of her aides worried about that a bit. If we liked Hillary only after she’d been humiliated, did that mean we liked humiliating her? Do you really like a person whom you want to humiliate?)

  First we watched A Time to Heal! . . . Bill Clinton saying he was sorry, over and over again, sometimes choked up, though it was difficult to determine what exactly he was sorry for. In his words, “inappropriate actions”—which could have meant anything from using the N word, using the F word, or cutting a loud and rude one aimed at Arafat while at Camp David. In an increasingly appropriate America, it could have meant just about anything, but whatever it was, Bill Clinton was sorry. So sorry, so very, very sorry. During this period of healing, he hung out with ministers the way he’d hung out with Steven and Jeffrey and David, and clutched his Bible like a man with emphysema clutches an oxygen tank, or like a man robbing a bank clutches a gun.

  Then, after this period of healing, choreographed for a monthlong period, like a ratings-sweep television miniseries, we watched A Time to Forgive! Hillary, back at his side, the sunglasses gone, Chelsea between them, even Buddy, the puppy, wagging his tail once again (and no longer squatting on the Rose Garden lawn).

  Even the most successful show, however, comes to an eventual end: Those insane Republicans kept yammering about impeachment—“The elephant has a thick skin, a head full of ivory, and, as everyone who has seen a circus parade knows, proceeds best by grasping the tail of his predecessor,” Adlai Stevenson had said—and the Beast, jittery and petulant, was showing signs of suffering sugar rush. So, to act out the screenplay written by Dick Morris, another distraction was needed. Impeachment? Had the Republicans completely lost their minds? Impeachment? With Bill Clinton’s approval rating sky-high and the economy booming? Impeachment? With even Hillary, the big loser in the midterm election of 1994, triumphant again thanks to her abject humiliation, admired again in her disgrace. Impeachment? No way! Not a chance! Nada! Zip! But still, just to make sure . . . another distraction was imperative.

  The policy wonks got together and wonked! An issue, maybe? Gay marriage? A new offensive in the war on big tobacco? How about a sequel to health care now that Hillary wasn’t radioactive anymore? More empowerment zones? A war against a new disease? How about a war against one of those diseases people were always hearing about on TV? That would guarantee an already-receptive, preconditioned audience. A war against hemorrhoids? Incontinence? Diarrhea? Male-pattern baldness? The ever-elusive Epstein-Barr virus? Constipation? A war against acid reflux?

  Some of the more hypochondriacal policy wonks waged a spirited campaign to expand the putative medical offensive from the limited target of acid reflux to the wider killing zone of heartburn. In arguing for the War on Burps—it admittedly didn’t have the ring of the War on Poverty or the War on Illiteracy—they pointed out that antiburp medication was already a $1.4 billion industry. A lot of dyspeptic Americans would rally gassily, their gastric juices sloshing, behind this distracting New Age flag.

  The War on Burps, some policy wonks explained, would also be seen as part of the administration’s Holy War on Cancer. Overflowing gastric juices left the esophagus with scar tissue and altered the cells that line it, thereby making those altered cells more likely to develop the dreaded terror, so much scarier than Saddam and all those other war criminals in biblical robes, Public Enemy Numero Uno . . . the Big C! But no, the wonks were just being wonkish. Cancer had already been wonked and milked even by liberal Republican wonks, the Compassionate Conservatives (which, some Hollywood wags said, was as oxymoronic as saying “lady producers”).

  What Bill Clinton needed desperately was a wild boar national tragedy, some hard-shell and awfully cynical pols felt (the kind of pols who thought Lee Harvey Oswald’s bullets passed the first Civil Rights Bill and James Earl Ray’s the second; who thought Reagan would have been nailed for Iran-Contra without Hinckley). Bill Clinton needed a humongous hurricane with thousands of deaths, or anthrax in Central Park, or a Three Mile Island meltdown on a Chernobyl scale, or the Big One in California voiding a chunk of coastline into the sea, or a Texas tower–type sniper in a ballpark. Something . . . on that tragic level. (The shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado, much later, would have been perfect.)

  Bill Clinton needed an event that would break America’s heart for a month or two. We’d go through the horror itself first. Then videotaped replays of the horror for weeks. Then we’d go through the grieving. Then videotaped replays of the grieving for more weeks. Prayers. Sermons. Sobbing faces. Children holding on to their mommies. Parents screaming. All mourning all the time! Then the experts would pontificate on Larry King Live, night after night, analyzing the horror and the grieving and the closure from all the replays, still picking through ruins—a child’s Raggedy Ann doll, a smashed photo of a smiling young couple found in the rubble, an old lady crying on an old man’s shoulder—as the camera panned across fresh graves at a turn-of-the-century cemetery . . . at sunset.

  Bill Clinton needed a Mike Tyson uppercut to our hearts. Something to soften us up. To put us into a more sensitive mood. To make us feel more forgiving. To make us feel better about him. (Reagan, his polls down during Iran-Contra, said, “Maybe I should go out and get myself shot again.”) Bill Clinton needed a great and horrible and welcome and opportune tragedy to put everything in perspective.

  . . .

  He didn’t get it. He didn’t get the apocalypse he needed, but he got something. The explosions at the American embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, final proof that the Good Lord was on Bill Clinton’s side. (Some would have their doubts later, when another act of God, a tornado, wiped out Bill Clinton’s former Little Rock statehouse, including Chelsea’s tree house.) Yes, Virginia, there was a Santa Claus! Bill Clinton was as happy as the day grocery stores started selling frozen pizzas! This act of God, these explosions, coming during the period when Bill Clinton was clutching his Bible, were truly heaven-sent. The explosions were planned and carried out by Arab terrorists.

  Forget the War on Burps; this war would be against Arab terrorists, and it would be real. The Beast would be showing America at war. The explosive cacophony of all of those bombs, live on CNN, would surely drown out the jibbering, jabbering cries for impeachment. The Creep would be recast as the Commander in Chief, clothing himself in the flag some insisted he’d burned in the sixties, draping Old Glory over the most inglorious part of his body.

  Just to firm up his support a bit, he dragged his Saddam scarecrow out of the Pentagon’s closet and hurled some more bombs and Tomahawks Saddam’s way, too. Oh, he flew through the air with the greatest of ease, the high-flying Creep on his political trapeze, dropping Tomahawks on Baghdad and Afghanistan and the Sudan! Boom! Boom! Boom! What a lovely, handy, perfect little boomer war this was! Even the old-style, dadgum, shitkicker rednecks (who hated him) got booby-trapped by this one. Yessir, Amurrica was at war, by God! And by God, we had to support our boys, by God, and support the commander in chief, by God, by God (even if they hated him), because, by God, he was the commander in chief.

  Well, sure, some people upchucked. Republicans Trent Lott of Mississippi and Gerald Solomon of New York, who’d seen that saddle burr Wag the Dog movie and thought they knew how to distinguish a reel show—first A Time to Heal! and then A Time to Forgive! and now A Time for War!—from real life. But when they criticized the cynicism and self-serving mendacity of the president of the United States, the nauseating and brazen t
iming of this, they were ambushed by their core constituencies. All those shit-kickers and By God Amurricans supporting our boys and the commander in chief. They had to stage a fast and undignified retreat.

  Lott and Solomon knew they were on slippery, dangerous ground anyway. There were crazy people out there on the Internet claiming that Bill Clinton had bombed our embassies to save his skin, with the help of the CIA. They were the same sort of ding-a-lings who in the past had claimed that LBJ and the CIA murdered 129 people (connected in some way with JFK’s assassination), and that LBJ, on the flight from Dallas to Washington, had stuck his willard into JFK’s wounds. Yea, verily, Trent Lott and Gerald Solomon did a big-assed retreat indeed . . . and our Tomahawks kept falling around the world.

  Cross-dressed in Old Glory now, fighting a victorious multifront war, officially and publicly forgiven by Hillary and Chelsea, riding his polls and approval ratings, the commander in chief thought for the first time that he could win the battle of his life. Not against big tobacco or the burps, not against terrorism and Saddam Hussein, but against Kenneth W. Starr. The war against Kenneth W. Starr would be the final distraction, the rarest filet mignon, served up to the Beast. Bill Clinton and his aides and his friends in the media (mostly sixties kids) would take this preacher’s son, whom Clinton considered “filthy and sleazy,” and turn him into the ghost of drunken Joe McCarthy: Kenneth W. Starr portrayed as peepingly sticking his nose into the holy of holies—America’s collective bedroom.

  Bill Clinton would Saddamize the preacher’s son the way Nixon had Saddamized McGovern. He would make Kenneth W. Starr the issue, not Bill Clinton. He would not allow himself to be ruined. He would ruin Starr. (“Here ruining reputations is considered sport,” Vince Foster had written in his suicide note.) Clinton would exploit Starr the way he believed Starr was trying to exploit him. He would accept the wisdom of his first White House counsel, Bernie Nussbaum, who had advised him “to do harm to enemies if you can.”