• Top adviser James Carville on Paula Jones, who claimed Clinton had sexually harassed her: “Drag $100 bills through trailer parks, there’s no telling what you’ll find.”
• Bill Clinton, speaking to a group of wealthy contributors, some of whom remained angry at Clinton for raising their taxes in 1993: “It might surprise you to know that I think I raised them too much too.”
• Webb Hubbell, former senior Department of Justice official and longtime Clinton friend, in the course of a conversation with his wife from prison: “So I have to roll over one more time.”
• In 1992, Bill Clinton promised during the campaign for the presidency to establish “the most ethical administration in the history of the republic.”
THE CLINTON MYSTERIES
Three great mysteries provoked endless debate during the Clinton years. Perhaps the most puzzling of all concerned the Paula Jones lawsuit. Jones claimed that Clinton, when he was governor of Arkansas, had exposed himself to her in the privacy of a hotel room. After he became president she filed a sexual harassment lawsuit against him in federal court. Jones’s former attorney told NBC’s Dateline that on two occasions Clinton was given the opportunity of ending the suit merely by making an apology and a $25,000 payment. Yet even after winning reelection in 1996, he refused. Jones continued to depose anyone and everyone she thought might be helpful to her case, eventually including Monica Lewinsky, Kathleen Wiley, Juanita Broaddrick, and many others. Clinton’s obtuse answers (or lies) to a federal court in the Jones case eventually precipitated the filing of impeachment charges against him.
A second great mystery is Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky. Why had he been so reckless? The affair began when Lewinsky, a young White House intern, delivered a pizza to Clinton in the winter of 1995 when the government had been shut down as a result of a high-stakes political dispute between the Republican-controlled Congress and the Clinton White House. At the time, Kenneth Starr, the “special prosecutor” appointed to investigate a failed real-estate transaction known as Whitewater, was searching the President’s past for damaging evidence. Paula Jones’s lawyers were looking for evidence to strengthen her case. Clinton, knowing that both Starr and Jones were after him, nonetheless carried on an affair with Monica Lewinsky. Among presidential mysteries this surely must rank as one of the most mysterious of all.
A third mystery was the public’s continued enthusiasm for Bill Clinton throughout the Lewinsky scandal. In all of American history there is no other parallel circumstance. At first, when the scandal broke on the Web site of Matt Drudge, pundits speculated that it might ultimately cost Clinton his presidency. ABC News reporter Sam Donaldson predicted that Clinton would be forced out of office within a matter of days if the allegations proved true. Dick Morris, the President’s pollster, conducted a survey to find out how the public was reacting to the news. Morris told Clinton that the public would tolerate infidelity but not lying about it. Clinton, in fact, lied and lied about the affair, denying to his wife, his friends, his cabinet, and the country that he had had “sex with that woman, Ms. Lewinsky.” And yet in the end the public not only tolerated their president lying, they sent his poll numbers soaring.
Some have explained that Clinton’s numbers remained high because he dragged out the scandal. Others note that Kenneth Starr was such a perfect foil that Clinton was able to rally support simply by opposing Starr. Though the House of Representatives impeached him, by the time the case reached the Senate there no longer was any drama left in the scandal. Clinton would escape conviction and save his presidency.
A final mystery from the Clinton administration began in 1993, just six months into his presidency, when White House aide Vince Foster was found dead in a wooded section near the George Washington Parkway. From the first the White House believed it was a suicide. Within days the park police, who initially handled the investigation, came to the same preliminary conclusion. But both Clinton’s enemies and friends agreed—though for different reasons—that there was an air of mystery surrounding Foster’s death. White House officials could not understand why Foster had killed himself, George Stephanopoulos telling the Washington Post, “The fundamental truth is that no one can know what drives a person to do something like this. Since you can’t ever know, it’s impossible to speculate on it. In the end, it is a mystery.” Adding to the doubts was the “belated discovery” of a torn note at the bottom of Foster’s briefcase, leading to speculation that White House aides had improperly tampered with evidence and perhaps concealed something embarrassing to the administration. Foster’s death was officially ruled a suicide. But so many questions were raised by Clinton’s enemies that doubts long persisted about the official story.
BILL CLINTON’S TELEPROMPTER PROBLEM
On September 22, 1993, Bill Clinton spoke before a joint session of Congress on behalf of his plan to revolutionize the health care system. When he stepped up to speak he noticed that technicians had loaded the wrong speech in the TelePrompTer. For ten minutes he spoke from memory while aides scrambled to install the correct speech.
Then it happened again. Almost. In 1997, as speechwriter Michael Waldman was riding in a limousine from the White House to Capitol Hill, he decided to put some final touches on the State of the Union address the president was about to deliver. Waldman, working on the speech on his laptop, added a single comma. Somehow doing so removed all of the formatting from the document. Suddenly, all of the text ran together, making it nearly impossible to read. As Clinton was making his way to the podium, Waldman worked behind the scenes with the Marine aide in charge of the TelePrompTer machine to enter paragraph breaks by hand. They got it done just as Clinton began to speak.
SOURCE: Michael Waldman, POTUS Speaks (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002).
PEARL HARBOR: THE MOVIE
In 2001, on the sixtieth anniversary of Pearl Harbor, CNN aired a story about the just-released Disney movie about the Japanese attack. In the middle of the story, up popped some black-and-white footage of gunners firing their weapons into the sky. According to the CNN reporter, this was “actual footage” of the Pearl Harbor attack. That is, this was not like the footage in the rest of the story that came from the Disney movie. This was real!
Viewers who were paying attention might have wondered. The shots didn’t look like they came from a home movie. They were perfectly framed. You could almost swear a director was off-camera shouting directions to the photographer to be sure to make the gunners look as heroic as possible. About the only difference between these pictures and those from the Disney movie was that Disney’s were in color.
How did the photographer manage to get such picture-perfect shots amidst the chaos of the Pearl Harbor attack? By shooting them on a Hollywood back lot, that’s how. They come from the movie December 7th, directed by John Ford. A short while after Pearl Harbor, Ford re-created in Los Angeles the Japanese sneak attack. He had to re-create the scene because there were hardly any pictures from the real attack. According to film historian Rick Decroix, there exists less than one minute’s worth of actual footage. All the rest of the footage you’ve ever seen was shot by Hollywood.
CNN’s story was not the first to mistakenly pass off Ford’s movie footage as the real thing. Decroix says he knows of at least two documentaries that did so as well a decade earlier at the time of the fiftieth anniversary of Pearl Harbor.
Blame the mix-up on the federal government, which sponsored the movie. To inflame public opinion against the Japanese, American officials wanted the public to believe they were seeing actual battle footage. So CNN and the others were taken in by a government propaganda plot hatched decades ago during World War II.
ALEXANDER GRAHAM WHO?
On June 11, 2002, to little fanfare, the U.S. House of Representatives declared that the telephone was invented by an Italian-American named Antonio Meucci, a sausage and candle maker. Forget Alexander Graham Bell. The House declared that Bell’s patent for the telephone was based on “fra
ud and misrepresentation.”
News of the House resolution was slow to circulate. When the media contacted the curator of the Bell Homestead Museum in Brantford, Ontario, he said he was surprised. He hadn’t heard of the resolution. In Italy the news was greeted warmly, an Italian paper referring to “Bell as an impostor, profiteer, and a ‘cunning Scotsman’ who usurped Meucci’s spot in history, while Meucci died poor and unrecognized.”
Is it true that Meucci, not Bell, invented the telephone? Robert Bruce, the Pulitzer Prize–winning biographer of Bell, tersely dispatched the Meucci claim. “It’s ridiculous,” he said.
Meucci claimed that “by means of some little experiments, I came to discover that with an instrument placed at the ear and with the aid of electricity and a metallic wire, the exact word could be transmitted holding the conductor in the mouth.” Bruce says he was deluded. Meucci’s patent, says Bruce, was “essentially the same as connecting two tin cans with a string.”
Italian-Americans have long claimed that Meucci had been cheated of the honor of being recognized as the telephone’s inventor. Only one historian, however, took his claims seriously, Giovanni E. Schiavo, in a book published in 1958. Bruce says that Meucci not only failed to invent the telephone, he “did not understand the basic principles of the telephone either before or after Bell’s invention.”
The resolution honoring Meucci was introduced by Staten Island representative Vito Fossella. Fossella, claiming he based the resolution “on our study of historical records,” said he pressed for its passage “to honor the life and achievements long overdue of Antonio Meucci, a great Italian American and a former great Staten Islander.” The House allotted forty minutes to debate the measure. Five members of Congress spoke in favor; none spoke against. The resolution was approved by voice vote: “Resolved, That it is the sense of the House of Representatives that the life and achievements of Antonio Meucci should be recognized, and his work in the invention of the telephone should be acknowledged.”
SOURCE: History News Network (www.hnn.us/articles/802.html).
BUSH-SPEAK QUOTATIONS FROM PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH
• “I promise you I will listen to what has been said here, even though I wasn’t here.”—speaking at the President’s Economic Forum in Waco, Texas, August 13, 2002
• “The problem with the French is that they don’t have a word for entrepreneur.”—discussing with British prime minister Tony Blair the decline of the French economy
• “The public education system in America is one of the most important foundations of our democracy. After all, it is where children from all over America learn to be responsible citizens, and learn to have the skills necessary to take advantage of our fantastic opportunistic society.”—May 1, 2002
• “And so, in my State of the—my State of the Union—or State—my speech to the nation, whatever you want to call it, speech to the nation—I asked Americans to give 4,000 years—4,000 hours over the next—the rest of your life—of service to America. That’s what I asked—4,000 hours.”—Bridgeport, Connecticut, April 9, 2002
• “I understand that the unrest in the Middle East creates unrest throughout the region.”—Washington, D.C., March 13, 2002
• “There’s nothing more deep than recognizing Israel’s right to exist. That’s the most deep thought of all. . . . I can’t think of anything more deep than that right.”—Washington, D.C., March 13, 2002
• “My trip to Asia begins here in Japan for an important reason. It begins here because for a century and a half now, America and Japan have formed one of the great and enduring alliances of modern times. From that alliance has come an era of peace in the Pacific.”—Tokyo, February 18, 2002 (Bush’s father, George H. W. Bush, a bomber pilot during World War II, was shot down by the Japanese in 1945 and escaped death only by a daring open-sea rescue.)
• “The legislature’s job is to write law. It’s the executive branch’s job to interpret law.”—Austin, Texas, November 22, 2000
• “They want the federal government controlling Social Security like it’s some kind of federal program.”—November 2, 2000
• “I know what I believe. I will continue to articulate what I believe and what I believe—I believe what I believe is right.”—Rome, July 22, 2001
SOURCE: www.politicalhumor.about.com/library/blbushisms.htm.
THE FIRST AMERICAN?
About 9,200 years ago, a man lived and died by the northern shore of the Columbia River near present-day Kennewick, Washington. He was a tough guy. Years before his death a stone spear point had been hurled into his hip and never removed. Later his chest had been crushed, and his left arm had withered. Yet he lived to be about 45 years old, and he probably died from an infection. And he apparently was not a “Native American,” since his features did not match those of the present-day Indian people of the Pacific Northwest. He is one of North America’s most exciting archaeological finds and a big political problem.
Nine thousand years later, give or take a few years, two young men waded into a shallow area of the Columbia to get a better view of the final race at the 1996 annual Tri-Cities Water Follies hydroplane races. One of the men stepped on a round object, put his hands in the water to inspect, and pulled out a human skull. Being true sports fans, the men hid the skull near a bush and returned to their spot to view the final hydro race. They then called the Kennewick police, who called local anthropologists. About 90 percent of the man’s skeleton was recovered from the shallow water. At first police and anthropologists assumed the man was an early European settler from maybe a hundred years ago. But the spear tip lodged in his hip was obviously older, so they sent a small bone from the hand to the University of California, Riverside, to be carbon dated. The results were shocking. Kennewick Man, as the skeleton came to be called, had lived and died in southern Washington some 9,200 to 9,600 years ago. He was literally older than Moses.
So who was Kennewick Man? The few anthropologists who examined him reported he did not resemble a modern American Indian. He was tall and thin with a long skull. His face was narrow and prognathous, not broad and flat. “I thought we had found an early European settler,” speculated one expert after seeing Kennewick Man’s Caucasian features. A white guy living in the New World 9,200 years ago? No one could know Kennewick Man’s skin color. The only thing for certain was that his remains showed that the original settlement of the Americas was more complicated than previously imagined.
The skull of Kennewick Man, the 9,200-year-old “First American” recently found in a shallow area of the Columbia River near Kennewick, Washington. This skull has caused some to speculate on the possibility that the earliest Native Americans may have looked more like Captain Picard from Star Trek than any present-day Native Americans.
But Kennewick Man had been unearthed into our modern, political world. Because Kennewick Man was found on federal property, the Army Corps of Engineers assumed possession of the body. Almost immediately upon discovering Kennewick Man’s age, five Pacific Northwest Indian tribes claimed his body under the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act, a law designed to return American Indian remains to tribes. The government immediately agreed. The tribes planned to rebury Kennewick Man in a traditional tribal ceremony and not let any scientist study the skeleton. “Let the anthropologists study their own bones,” stated one Yakima tribe official.
Eight scientists, including two from the Smithsonian Institution, filed a lawsuit against the government and the tribes to allow scientific examination of the skeleton. Whether Kennewick Man was an ancient relative of these tribes was very debatable, they argued. On preliminary examination he did not look anything like a member of these tribes, or any other traditional “Native American.” Study of the skeleton would be valuable in understanding ancient migration patterns into the New World. The case would drag through the court system for years.
Both the Indians and the government had an interest in claiming Kennewick Man was Indian. The tribes wante
d to preserve the impression that they are the original Native Americans. The government wanted to maintain good relations with the tribes. Indeed, an internal memo from the Army Corps of Engineers, which routinely negotiated with the tribes over fishing and water rights, stated, “All risk to us seems to be associated with not repatriating the remains.”
And what of the site where Kennewick Man was found? Was it an ancient burial ground or village? Or had Kennewick Man been alone when he died? This is unknown—and now never will be known. After initially allowing some preliminary archaeological work to proceed, the Corps of Engineers suddenly reversed itself and announced that the site had to be destroyed to help control erosion along the Columbia River bank. Doc Hastings, a congressman from Washington who had lived in an area overlooking the site, disagreed. “There is no significant erosion,” Hastings explained. “That part of the river isn’t even free flowing—it’s part of a lake behind a dam.” With Hastings’s help, both the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate passed bills to halt the planned destruction, but before the two bills could be reconciled, the Corps of Engineers dumped 500 tons of rock and gravel from helicopters on top of the area. An additional 300 tons of dirt and logs were moved in to layer the river shoreline, and thousands of trees were planted on the remade terrain. Archaeologically speaking, the site had been destroyed. Other Corps documents indicated a “concern on the part of the [Clinton] White House” led to the quickly executed erosion-control plan.
In September 1998, a federal judge ordered Kennewick Man moved to Seattle’s Burke Museum for safekeeping. The Corps of Engineers had not done a good job of babysitting the ancient skeleton. While the body was off limits to scientists and the public, the Corps had lent him out four times to Indian groups for ceremonies. When the Burke finally took an inventory of the ancient bones, major pieces were missing. The stolen bones have never been recovered.
One-Night Stands with American History Page 29