Bill Clinton

by Michael Tomasky

  But then came the baroque chain of events that in time would almost drive Clinton from office. On the same day that Fiske released his report in June 1994, Clinton signed his name to a new independent counsel law. He hated doing it, for his own sake and on principle; a prosecutor with unlimited time and funds amounted to a virtual fourth branch of government unto himself. This was an opinion held by many on both sides of the political aisle. In fact, the case against independent counsels had been made forcefully by conservative Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia in 1988, when he was the lone justice to hold that such prosecutors were unconstitutional.

  An independent counsel is selected, and the scope of his or her authority prescribed, by a panel of judges. What if they are politically partisan, as judges have been known to be, and select a prosecutor antagonistic to the administration?… There is no remedy for that, not even a political one.

  Clinton’s signature on the new law had one major and fateful implication: it shifted the oversight responsibility of an independent counsel from the attorney general’s office to a special three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit known as the Special Division. The head of this unit was David Sentelle, a conservative Republican judge who had called liberals “leftist heretics” in a journal article and whose partisan views were well known. The panel included another conservative judge, which gave them a majority. Reno forwarded Fiske’s name to the Special Division, which she thought was just a pro forma move, but on August 5, 1994, the Special Division fired Fiske, citing a preposterous alleged conflict. (Fiske’s huge law firm—not Fiske himself, merely the firm—had once represented International Paper, which years before had sold some product to Jim McDougal.)

  The panel replaced him with Kenneth Starr, the former solicitor general under President George H. W. Bush. Starr had a good reputation in Washington social circles but also a long record of conservative activism that wasn’t widely known at the time. He was also sitting on more than one potential legal conflict of interest that he did not reveal. His own huge law firm, Kirkland & Ellis, represented International Paper at the time of his appointment (although the firm did drop that representation after Starr was named). Fiske had given every indication that he was going to wrap up his investigation in a few months. Starr took no significant action during the election season, but in January, with Republicans in control of Congress, he announced that he was reopening the Foster investigation.

  Starr’s appointment was a crucial victory for a “movement” of people who were willing to say anything about Clinton—backed by rich people who were willing to pay the conspiracy mongers very well to do it. The Pittsburgh billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife funded something called the “Arkansas Project,” designed to send journalists and investigators to the Natural State to dig up anything they could on Clinton, or to make things up when the digging proved fruitless. The Reverend Jerry Falwell, the founder of the Moral Majority, made a “documentary” called The Clinton Chronicles, which alleged that the president had had a number of people killed; the “Clinton body count” became a thing that these people actually discussed seriously. The mainstream media did not exactly embrace this nonsense, but the mere reporting on it gave the theories oxygen.

  There was a darker side to all this right-wing rage, aimed not just at the Clintons but at government and even American society generally. Far-right fringe movements that trafficked in race hatred and conspiracy theories about Jews had existed for decades; a movement with an actual name, the Patriot Movement, went back to the 1950s or ’60s. But two events had driven larger numbers into what was by this time called the militia movement: the 1992 raid by federal agents on the home of a survivalist named Randy Weaver, which resulted in the death of his unarmed wife and son in Ruby Ridge, Idaho; and the government’s storming the following year of the compound of the Branch Davidians, a sect run by a messianic extremist named David Koresh, who had brainwashed adults, seduced underage girls, and fathered numerous children. A long standoff at the compound in Waco, Texas, finally led to a raid that resulted in seventy-six dead, more than twenty of them children. This had happened under the new Democratic president, a man who had been presumed in far-right circles to hanker to slam down the federal jackboot on the nation’s throat even before such a raid.

  The ranks of survivalists swelled. They especially despised the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF), which was said to be coming for everyone’s guns. Books like The Turner Diaries, a novel by a white supremacist in which the government is overthrown and all “undesirable” races eliminated, sold briskly. Some of the new conservative radio hosts fueled this paranoia directly: G. Gordon Liddy, the convicted Watergate conspirator, once advised his listeners that if they saw an ATF man approaching, “Go for a head shot; they’re going to be wearing bulletproof vests.” Republican officeholders fed this beast, too. Numerous southern and western Republicans pandered to their constituents’ fear of the federal government and showily browbeat representatives of these agencies who came to testify on Capitol Hill.

  Clinton limped through the spring; on the night of April 18, 1995, he gave a news conference that two of the three major television networks didn’t even carry live. A journalist asked him about this, and about how the Gingrich Republicans had all the energy on their side, and the president was reduced to reminding America that “the president is relevant; the Constitution gives me relevance.” The next day was the two-year anniversary of the Waco raid. The White House news on the front page of that day’s New York Times concerned the president’s rejection of a Republican welfare reform bill. And then, at 9:02 a.m. central time, a bomb exploded at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Office Building in Oklahoma City, ripping an exterior wall off the nine-story building. The blast killed 168 people, including 19 children who attended day care in the building.

  It didn’t take authorities long to identify the perpetrator, a young man named Timothy McVeigh. Barely an hour after the explosion McVeigh was stopped for a traffic violation and arrested for illegal handgun possession, so, conveniently enough, he was in jail already when the clues led authorities his way. McVeigh, a native of upstate New York, was a decorated Gulf War veteran whose antigovernment instincts had grown more intense after he left the service; the Waco raid had radicalized him completely, and he’d vowed to exact revenge.

  Before the bombing he had written a letter to the ATF that said, “ATF, all you tyrannical people will swing in the wind one day for your treasonous actions against the Constitution of the United States.” With regard to the attack, McVeigh and his coconspirator, Terry Nichols, had been methodical. For months, McVeigh had scoped out various federal buildings that housed ATF and other law enforcement offices, finally settling on the Murrah building partly because he expected its glass front to shatter, making for a dramatic visual. His chosen date, of course, was no coincidence.

  A searing debate ensued about the extent to which conservative propagandists and even some Republicans were culpable for the mind-set that led to the attack. New York magazine’s cover for the week of May 8, 1995, blared “The Un-Americans,” with photographs of Liddy, Oliver North, Rush Limbaugh, Pat Robertson, and two GOP senators, Phil Gramm and Jesse Helms. Conservatives pushed back hard. Gingrich, the man who had all but blamed the Democratic Party for a mentally ill mother’s murder of her two kids, called any attempt to connect the dots between Republican rhetoric and the bombing “grotesque and offensive.”

  Four days after the bombing, Clinton went to Oklahoma City and delivered an uncharacteristically brief eulogy. The president who had been reduced to defending his relevance just a few days before now showed that he was relevant—as a son of the South (and a neighboring state, even) and as a Democrat trying to comfort a mostly Republican state, Clinton turned something of a corner with the speech. “You have lost too much,” he told the mourners, “but you have not lost everything. And you have certainly not lost America, for we will stand with you for as many tomorrows as it tak
es.”

  American political discourse had once operated within broadly agreed-upon boundaries of self-restraint. It grew out of shared respect for our institutions; the shared experiences of Depression and world war that gave Democratic and Republican politicians a set of bonds that transcended partisan politics; and an understood need during the Cold War to be Americans at the end of the day. The Oklahoma tragedy allowed Clinton to feel and help forge that transcendence for a fleeting moment. But as he was learning and would learn even more pointedly later, those days were mostly gone.

  * * *

  For the first half of 1995, Clinton offered no budget or economic plan of his own, preferring to lambaste the deep spending cuts in the proposed Republican budget. Dick Morris, now fully back in the president’s inner circle, persuaded him that he needed to put forward a plan of his own—he was, after all, the president. So on June 13, Clinton delivered an Oval Office address laying out his path toward eliminating the budget deficit in ten years. Gingrich and Dole had pledged to meet this goal in seven years. The deficit had already fallen by more than 40 percent under Clinton, from $290 billion in 1992 to $164 billion in 1995—largely as a result of the 1993 tax legislation and the improving economy—but deficit reduction was still a salient issue. Clinton told the country that the Republican cuts to education, entitlements, and the environment, and their tax cuts weighted toward the wealthy, were more than he could sign on to. But Clinton’s ten-year timetable was also more than most liberal Democrats could sign on to, so he caught a lot of flak from his own party. But for the political purposes of this New Democrat president, whose first two years had gone down in conventional wisdom as “too liberal,” this was just fine.

  Thus the budget clash began in earnest. Over the summer of 1995, both sides issued repeated dire warnings to the public that if the other side didn’t budge, the government might shut down. Most observers thought something so dysfunctional could never happen. For his part, Clinton had other things to worry about that summer, notably Bosnia—in July, the Bosnian Serb Army massacred eight thousand Bosnian Muslim men and boys at Srebrenica. The next month, Croatian forces massacred fourteen thousand Serbs in Krajina, precipitating the worst refugee crisis of the war. Clinton’s national security adviser Anthony Lake had by this time persuaded reluctant European leaders to accept a more aggressive role, and NATO launched Operation Deliberate Force, flying some 3,500 sorties against Serb positions, which set the stage for the peace talks that would finally end the war. In September, Hillary went to Beijing to speak at a UN conference on women. Her speech, including the oft-cited line “Human rights are women’s rights, and women’s rights are human rights,” spoken to a host country that was not known for sharing that view, quickly became regarded as one of her finest moments.

  The fiscal year was set to end on September 30, 1995, and still there was no budget. Congress passed a continuing resolution to keep the lights on as the administration and Congress negotiated. But throughout October, talks went nowhere. Then, in another arena, tragedy struck. On November 4, Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in Tel Aviv by a right-wing Jew enraged by Rabin’s peacemaking efforts with the Palestinians. The assassination hit Clinton especially hard, because he and Rabin had grown to be close friends. “By the time he was killed,” Clinton later wrote, “I had come to love him as I had rarely loved another man.” The U.S. delegation to the funeral aboard Air Force One was bursting with ex-presidents, diplomats, senators, and House members, including Gingrich and Dole. The Republican leaders wanted some presidential face time on the return flight to talk budget, but White House aides shielded Clinton, writes John Harris, because they feared he would agree to terms “that would amount to a Republican victory.” Instead, Clinton passed the time playing cards with New York Daily News publisher Mort Zuckerman.

  The continuing resolution was set to expire at midnight on November 13. That day, Clinton summoned congressional leaders of both parties to the White House. He got into a heated discussion with Dick Armey, the House majority leader, over Medicare cuts. “Even if I drop to 5 percent in the polls,” Clinton huffed, “if you want your budget, you’ll have to get someone else to sit in this chair!” But the Republicans still held in their heads the image of Clinton as a president who could be rolled; they didn’t believe he meant it.

  This time, he did mean it. The new continuing resolution placed before him, to extend government operations a few more weeks, contained Medicare cuts that would have dramatically hiked premiums for senior citizens. Clinton vetoed it. And on November 14, nonessential operations of the federal government began shutting down.

  At first, the shutdown hurt both parties in the eyes of the public, but then something big happened. Gingrich appeared at a newsmakers breakfast sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor. There, while being questioned about the shutdown by Lars-Erik Nelson, the widely respected Washington columnist for Zuckerman’s Daily News, Gingrich launched into a harangue about how peeved he was not to have been able to talk about the budget with Clinton during the return flight from Tel Aviv. Then, displaying the utter lack of that internal governor that lets most politicians know when they should just shut up, he spoke of being forced to sit in the back of the plane and to exit through the rear.

  The next day, the newspaper owned by the man who had enjoyed the president’s company on that return flight produced one of the most memorable—and damaging—tabloid newspaper front pages of all time. “CRY BABY,” the Daily News blared, in enormous bold type. Below the headline: “Newt’s Tantrum: He closed down the government because Clinton made him sit at back of plane.” Ed Murawinski’s devastating cartoon showed a fleshy and corpulent Newt as a baby, bawling, stomping his feet, in diapers, clutching a baby bottle.

  Gingrich later wrote that his remarks constituted the “single most avoidable mistake” he made as Speaker. He hustled to cut a deal to reopen the government on November 19, but by this point the Republicans were receiving far more blame for the shutdown than Clinton was. And that deal was temporary, too, so hard negotiating still had to be done.

  The next round of talks began with Clinton making a key accommodation to the Republicans. On the same day the government reopened, he would publicly accept their seven-year deficit-reduction target. But he still didn’t accept their budget cuts.

  In the midst of the negotiations, the president went on an overseas trip, to Britain and Ireland, returning home in mid-December—just in time for a second government shutdown, which began on December 16. This one would last longer than the first, a full twenty-seven days. It was eased by the fact that roughly five hundred thousand federal employees were deemed “essential” and thus permitted to continue to come to work, but veterans’ benefits, among other obligations, went unpaid that month.

  After the holidays, polling showed the Republicans were paying a far higher political price for the impasse. Clinton had won. He managed to undo his reputation in Washington as someone who could be rolled; to the larger public, he’d stood his ground on some principles—opposing crippling cuts to entitlements, education, and the environment—on which a majority agreed with him. And he’d outstared Gingrich, who had simply miscalculated. “We made a mistake. We thought you would cave,” he admitted to the president in early January 1996. It was a pretty good way to start a reelection year.

  6

  The Culture Wars

  On the surface, life was fine in the America of 1996. The economy had rebounded, adding nearly 2.5 million jobs over the previous year. The Cold War was won, and the nation was at peace. Personal computers were suddenly and astonishingly connected to the outside world, and people could use them to chat with friends and family anywhere in the country or even beyond, or to do something called a “search” and learn in an instant the best bargain hotels in Paris or what season it was that Wilt Chamberlain averaged fifty points a game or which films were nominated for Best Picture in 1977. There were warnings from some pessimistic quarters that this new
information age would alter our economy and our habits and even our brains in ways we couldn’t possibly anticipate, but for most people the Internet was a miracle—the kind of miracle America naturally delivered to its citizens.

  A bit below the surface, though, the United States was at war—with itself. This had started in the mid- to late 1980s, as the sweeping cultural changes that had their roots in the 1960s became more mainstream. Most Americans accepted these changes more or less ungrudgingly. But as the vast audiences created by Rush Limbaugh and his imitators had shown, many millions of Americans dissented from this transformation. They didn’t like feminism and multiculturalism and diversity and gay people coming out of the closet, which started happening in fairly large numbers in the late 1980s, and they despised the way the media had (from their point of view) so casually embraced these changes, “shoving it down our throats” and enforcing this new blight called “political correctness.”

  In 1987, the University of Chicago philosopher Allan Bloom wrote The Closing of the American Mind, a broadside against the emergent enforced codes of speech and behavior on American campuses. It became a huge best seller. Bloom represented the high-end version of conservative dissent. Farther down the intellectual totem pole was a host of polemicists and provocateurs—Dinesh D’Souza and William Bennett between hard covers, and figures such as Morton Downey Jr. on television and Limbaugh and the others on radio—who kept the fire raging.