Bill Clinton, as Toni Morrison put it so well, was “the first black president of the United States”—one reason why the Republican posse hated him so much. But black people knew in their bones what this posse was about. The posse’s spiritual ancestor was J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI icon who liked to wear red dresses and feather boas, who had one teenage boy read to him from the Bible while another diddled him wearing a rubber glove. The rheumy-eyed old queen had tried to do to Martin Luther King, Jr., what the posse was now forming to do to Bill Clinton.
Hoover, described as looking like “a remarkably ugly woman” when dressed in a short, flounced black dress with lace stockings, high heels, a curly black wig, pancake makeup, and false eyelashes, wasn’t in good shape at the end of his reign. He hated people with moist palms or pimples or people who were bald or had their ears sticking out. He hated germs and flies, keeping on his staff a black servant whose duty was to swat them.
More than anything or anyone else, he hated Martin Luther King, Jr., especially after Dr. King won the Nobel Prize in 1964. Ferreting into Dr. King’s private life, the kiddy-porn lover assigned his agents to tape-record Dr. King in flagrante delicto with a woman other than his wife. Hoover sent the tapes in an unmarked box to Coretta King, with an anonymous note that urged Dr. King to kill himself as “the honorable way out.” Dr. King didn’t know, as he tried to keep his marriage together, that he was still being taped—that Hoover was giggling every evening as he listened to Dr. King’s tortured discussions with his wife. But Dr. King didn’t allow the tapes to stop the crusade that would transform America. When he was assassinated several years later, an FBI agent in Atlanta shouted, “We finally got the son of a bitch!”
As the posse formed for the lynching of Bill Clinton, African-Americans made it clear they were not going to allow the political assassination of “the first black president of the United States.” “Let us not be confused,” Jesse Jackson’s son, Jesse Jackson, Jr., said. “The Republicans are impeaching Social Security, they are impeaching affirmative action, they are impeaching women’s right to choose, they are impeaching Medicare, Medicaid, Supreme Court justices who believe in equal protection under the law for all Americans. Something deeper in history is happening than sex, lying about sex, and perjury.” Representative Maxine Waters, Democratic congresswoman from California, said, “This is indeed a Republican coup d’état. The Republicans will couch this extremist radical anarchy in pious language which distorts the Constitution and the rule of law. Bill and Hillary Clinton are the real targets, and the Republicans are the vehicles being used by the right-wing Christian Coalition extremists to direct and control our culture.” John Conyers, Democrat from Michigan, chairman of the congressional Black Caucus, said, “Impeachment was designed to rid this nation of tyrants and traitors, not attempts to cover up extramarital affairs.” Perhaps John Lewis, the venerable veteran of so many street-fought civil rights battles, put it most powerfully: “America is sick. Her heart is heavy. Her soul is aching. Who among us has not sinned?”
Black people heard the Republican rhetoric about raising the flag at Iwo Jima and the Founding Fathers and the incessant waving of the Constitution (which some Republicans kept in their pockets) and they knew damn well what they were hearing: It was the same old cracker bullshit. It had red-white-and-blue sparkles on top, but it still smelled to high heaven. More specifically, it was the same old Republican cracker bullshit . . . the party of Lincoln still mutated as the party of whippin’, the party of lynchin’. Earl Butz was a Republican, wasn’t he? He’d said, “All a black man needs is a new Cadillac, a tight pussy, and a warm place to shit.” And James Watt was a Republican, too, Reagan’s secretary of the interior. And he’d said, talking about a commission he’d appointed, “We have every kind of mix you can have. I have a black. I have a woman, two Jews, and a cripple.” And George Bush was a Republican, scaring all the white folks with that ad about bad Willie Horton, who just happened to be black, raising the specter of black people out there robbin’, rapin’, maraudin’. George Bush didn’t even bother to make a trip to L.A. after the Rodney King explosion. And Nixon or Reagan—how many black faces had anyone seen around them? Eartha Kitt? Sammy Davis, Jr., with his Nehru jacket, love beads, and mile-long cigar? And James “Go for the Green” Brown? And what about right now—which black faces were in there among the Republicans? J.C. “Couldn’t Make It to the NFL” Watt? Or Clarence “Long Dong Silver” Thomas, who liked to go fishing with that sexual-harassing cracker from Texas, Dick Armey? The truth, black people sensed, was not subtly hidden in lifelong Republican Linda Tripp’s words. The Ratwoman said she didn’t want to get her hair done during the Million Man March because she “didn’t want to see all those—all those bodies.” (Chris Rock made the same point in reverse at the Republican National Convention: “I feel like I’m at the Million White Boy March.”)
Even among Democrats, black people had never felt like they had one of their own. Everybody knew LBJ was a cracker, him and his cowboy hats, talking about “nigger” this and “nigger” that among his cronies . . . . JFK believed it, he talked the talk, but did he walk off into the night with black women? Did he sit down and do some ribs with Jackie? . . . McGovern had as much soul as a Kiwanis Club president in a one-horse town . . . . Jimmah was okay, but he was a damned old fool when he was still a young man . . . . Dukakis or Du-who? or Du-whatever, aw, man, who was that chump? Somebody gonna do his woman and the chump says he gonna . . . aw, man!
But now Bill—President Bill Clinton—he was different. No wonder he’d been called “Niggerhead” and “Nigger Lips” his whole life. No broomstick up his white ass. None of this “I share your concern” crap, a stiff shake of the hand and I’ll see you next election. Bill Clinton could get down. In all kinds of ways. With the sax. With the ribs. With his shades. With the bitches. Down, man, human. Real. It was in his eyes and the way he hugged you if you were black. He meant it. He walked the walk in all kinds of ways. And Hillary. Maybe she wasn’t black like he was black, but at least she tried. For a white bitch from the lily white suburbs, she really tried. Didn’t she always say the greatest moment of her life was meeting Martin Luther King, Jr.? When she was up there in her private fancy Yankee school, didn’t she try to make sure the brothers weren’t done over by the po-lice? Didn’t she even work for a Black Panther lawyer one summer? Didn’t she go into the ghet-to when she was a girl, even if it was like a class trip to the zoo? Not bad. Not bad at all for someone from Park Ridge, Illinois, the same place that white-haired cracker with the sore ass was from . . . Hyde, Mr. Henry . . . that fool gonna put the flag up on Iwo Jima again? . . . Mr. Henry Hyde.
Bill Clinton knew and liked black people as much as he liked his fellow whites; didn’t see an ounce of difference between them. Not even at first at the integrated convenience store his Papaw used to run. Played with black people, hugged them, cussed them, fought them, dated them, seduced them, passed legislation for them, tried to help them . . . and black people recognized that, relative to all the other white politicians, there was something special about him. Hillary didn’t have his flow, and there was talk about how Hillary had dissed the only black man in the Senate when she was in college, but even that didn’t matter, because lots of people thought Edward Brooke was more white than black, and anyway, he was a Republican. But Bill Clinton had flow, ease, soul, and when he ran for president, black voters responded to him. He’d kept his promises, too, just as he had in Arkansas, where he’d appointed an unprecedented number of black people to state boards and commissions. He appointed Ron Brown secretary of commerce, Mike Espy secretary of agriculture, Hazel O’Leary secretary of energy, Jesse Brown secretary of veterans’ affairs, Clifton Wharton, Jr., deputy secretary of state, and Dr. Joycelyn Elders surgeon general. And he saved affirmative action and welfare from the planned cross-burning by Newt Gingrich and his “Contract with America” Republicans.
There was one other relatively hidden factor, too, which indicated the absolu
te lack of a smidgen of racism on Bill Clinton’s part. Clearly a man who enjoyed intimate contact with women, he enjoyed intimate contact with black women, too. No wonder his name was William Jefferson Clinton. He may have been a sexual predator or he may have been a satyr, but he didn’t discriminate. His willard was an equal opportunity predator, his satyriasis was integrated. The point was that he enjoyed contact with black flesh. No president since Thomas Jefferson had been known to enjoy that. JFK and LBJ had enjoyed contact with thousands of women and no one ever implied that even one of them was black. Bill Clinton, meanwhile, was being linked with a black Little Rock newswoman, with a black former Miss America, with former Commerce Secretary Ron Brown’s daughter, with a black prostitute who claimed to have given birth to his child, linked even in Joe Klein’s fictional Primary Colors to a black teenager whom he impregnates. The president of the United States was making love to black women in an America that had been suffering racial strife for forty years. Perhaps not the Great Emancipator, the Great Masturbator was also the Great Integrator. No wonder black people loved him and white racists hated him: Bill Clinton understood black people from the inside.
It drove the racists to their usual excess: Some claimed that the only reason Bill Clinton liked black women was because he was black himself. They pointed to the fullness of his lower lip, his mother’s flirtatious nature, and his birth father’s death while he was still in the womb. But if the racists thought they were damaging him by making their charges on the Internet and in faxed sheets, they were wrong. It only strengthened Bill Clinton’s already-massive black support. Maybe he really was the first black president of the United States. Fine! Dig it! About damned time!
As the unyielding, adamantine nature of the president’s black support became apparent, the same old polarization became apparent, too, the same deep electoral chasm we had seen during the Night Creature’s reign between the Silent Majority and the rest of us. The Silent Majority then and now was made up of Christian Conservatives, Republicans, strict Constitutionalists, and nonrelative moralists screaming for Bill Clinton’s lynching. They also included, as they always had, those people who simply didn’t like “niggers.”
But there was a difference this time, as the November elections showed. There were more of us than them. They were no longer a majority. Those of us who had grown up in the sixties respected and, in some cases, revered black people. The unyielding nature of their support for Bill Clinton influenced those soccer moms and Little League dads who were maybe wavering in their support of the president who had dropped his wet, half-chewed cigar on their dinner tables. We were struck by the steel in the black response to the charges. We were reminded in our preretirement years that the battle for equality among whites and blacks in the sixties was still being fought by some people. We saw that the police batons now were in the hands of Gingrich and DeLay and Armey and Hyde, et al. We realized that black people felt if Bill Clinton was removed from office, they’d be back where they were before . . . because he was one of them. Were we, the white generation that had fought alongside our black brothers for civil rights, now going to let people like John Lewis, a hero to us in the sixties, down?
We had aged since then, too, and there was another element to this black anger that we found deeply troublesome. There was an anger at play here that we recognized from the sixties, its last manifestation the reaction to the Rodney King verdict not too many years ago. We remembered all too well the urban riots and racial conflagrations in Watts and Detroit and Cleveland and Newark and so many other cities. We remembered our cities burning and occupied by National Guardsmen. We remembered the explosion of black rage following Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination as we remembered the more recent images of snipers on rooftops on Sunset Boulevard. But crime was down now.
Bill Clinton, thanks to his special relationship with black people, had accomplished the tentative beginnings of a racial peace in America. If things weren’t exactly cool, they certainly weren’t hot anymore, either. We didn’t have to worry about driving down certain streets after certain hours. We could walk by a group of black people on a street corner without hearing trash. Bill Clinton, the first black president of the United States, had done that.
Were we going to risk our welcome and relative sense of peace by letting him be removed from office? Were we going to risk an explosion of black rage once again in our cities? Ross Perot may have been talking about caravans of trucks coming from everywhere, carrying petitions for Bill Clinton’s resignation, but we were more concerned about National Guard half-tracks coming from everywhere to invade our cities again. If we thought there was going to be a riot in L.A. upon O. J. Simpson’s conviction, what did we think was going to happen across America if Bill Clinton was removed from office?
It was Bill Clinton’s race card and, Slick Willy poker player that he was, he played it brilliantly. He was photographed with black leaders every chance he got. The Reverend Jesse Jackson seemed to shuttle between appearing on Larry King Live and counseling the first family at the White House. When the president arrived at Martha’s Vineyard after his admission that he had “misled the American people,” there to greet him with a bear hug was Vernon Jordan, one of the most prominent black men in America, the former head of the NAACP, his old friend, and Monica’s job hunter. During his “I Ask Your Forgiveness” tour, Bill Clinton’s first heavily televised event was at a small black Baptist church.
We were receiving a subliminal White House message that no one would ever articulate. These are my beloved and loving constituents, Bill Clinton was telling America. They will go to the wall for me. They will be extremely unhappy if I am removed from office. Do you really want them to be extremely unhappy? Do you want that to happen now, when the economy is booming and you don’t have a whole lot of worries in your life? Do you want to have to worry about that again?
Just as the race card was being played, a joker fell on the table in the form of Danny Williams, Bill Clinton’s alleged black child. It was an old story, one that had been around since the mid-eighties, but reintroduced now within a fevered impeachment context, Danny Williams’s reappearance was explosive. Drudge had broken the story that the Star was financing DNA tests comparing Danny’s blood type to the analysis of Bill Clinton’s DNA published in the Starr Report. Alongside Drudge’s story was the photograph of a freckled, light-skinned, pudgy black teenager who looked, to many Americans, like the spittin’ image of young Billy Clinton. I was sitting in a meeting at Paramount Studios the day the Drudge Report came out, and no one at the meeting was discussing the script we were supposed to be discussing. Danny Williams was in the air. “That’s it,” said Sherry Lansing, the studio head. “If the DNA matches, Clinton’s gone.”
The details were certainly Clintonesque. He was jogging outside the governor’s mansion in 1983, said a black hooker named Bobbie Ann Williams. He pulled her behind a hedge and asked her for a blow job. He talked all through it. He pulled his pants up and jogged off. He came back two weeks later in a white Lincoln driven by a state trooper. He picked up Bobbie Ann and two of her hooker friends. They drove to a house in Hot Springs owned by his mother. He got into bed with all three of them. When Bobbie Ann, still hooking, ran into him on the street next, she told him she was four months pregnant. “He laughed,” Bobbie Ann said. “He was rubbing my big belly and said, ‘Girl, that can’t be my baby.’ ”
Shortly after Danny was born, Bobbie Ann went to jail for prostitution and possession of drugs. Lucille Bolton, Bobbie Ann’s sister, became Danny’s legal guardian. “He started to look more and more like the governor,” Lucille said. Lucille went to the governor’s mansion and confronted Clinton aides, trying to get child support for Danny. She got nowhere. Bill Clinton refused to supply a blood sample.
The story of Danny Williams got out into the local black tabloid press. Bobbie Ann and Lucille both took lie-detector tests and passed them. Don Williams, Bobbie Ann’s husband, drove up alongside the governor as he was jog
ging one fine sunshiny morning and confronted him about Danny. The governor kept jogging, but he threw all the cash he had in his pockets into the car. Gossip about Danny made its way around the state and even into a governors’ conference in Chicago. “Listen, I don’t have a black baby!” Bill Clinton told some of his fellow Democratic bigwigs.
When Drudge, in the midst of the impeachment crisis, broke his story about the Star’s DNA analysis, Danny Williams rocked America, appearing on the front page of the New York Post, although few other newspapers. Danny Williams was as much a firestorm underground story as the cigar had been before Starr issued his report. That’s all anyone in Hollywood and in much of the rest of the country was talking about.
Some people thought it suspicious that Clinton supporters had released a DNA study only weeks before showing that Thomas Jefferson had fathered a black child by Sally Hemmings. Were the Clintonistas anticipating a matching Danny Williams DNA? Was Thomas Jefferson being outed as an alibi for Bill Clinton? That is, if Thomas Jefferson had done it, had William Jefferson Clinton done anything that was wrong?
Days later, when Drudge reported that the DNAs didn’t match, that the spittin’ image of young Billy Clinton wasn’t Bill Clinton’s son, I thought I heard DeLay and Armey and Barr and Henry Hyde and Rogan and the rest of them groaning all the way out in Malibu. I could hear them sputtering: You can’t match DNA without actual DNA! You can’t match DNA on the basis of “information” in a report! The experts said, though, that they were wrong: That freckled-faced and pudgy Danny still didn’t have a daddy.
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