Clinton’s Next Chapter

One day a few months ago, R. Emmett Tyrrell telephoned with a jolly request. He wanted to know whether The New York Sun could help him get an invitation to a 60th birthday fund-raising banquet for President Clinton that was being held in Toronto. I told him that I liked to think of myself an as an editor who would do anything for a reporter or columnist and would be happy to try, but I cautioned him not to count on success. “Well, then,” Mr. Tyrrell said. “Don’t worry about it. Leave it with me.” And that is how I left it.So I just shook my head with admiration when I picked up Mr. Tyrrell’s latest book, “The Clinton Crack-Up: The Boy President’s Life After the White House” (Nelson Current, 320 pages, $26.99), and read the opening pages about his attendance at the former president’s 60th birthday party in Toronto. The escapade led to Mr. Tyrrell getting his photo taken with the man of whom he has become the most assiduous critic, and then dining with the 42nd president and a ballroom full of stars and political supporters. A lot of things have been said about Mr. Tyrrell over the years, but let it not be said that the editor of the American Spectator is not one determined reporter.His new book is the third of what might be called the “Crack-Up” chronicles. His first, “The Liberal Crack-Up,” I reviewed for the Wall Street Journal, where I observed that Mr. Tyrrell and his American Spectator magazine had brought in one of the great scoops of his generation, which is that American liberalism had become laughable. The second tome in the series, which I reviewed for the Forward, was “The Conservative Crack-Up,” in which Mr. Tyrrell made it clear that the right was not immune to the barbs of his pen. In it he faulted conservatives for getting outmaneuvered in the cultural wars.“The Clinton Crack-Up” carries on from Mr. Tyrrell’s coverage of the Clinton scandals, where the American Spectator and the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal led the way, with a supporting role being played at times by the New York Times. Here Mr. Tyrrell is writing about Mr. Clinton’s post-presidency, one that has cost the American taxpayer more than any other former president’s and one that has seen the post-president himself has racked up astonishing sums in speaking fees, some from unsavory sources. In a season when Senator Clinton is off and running on her presidential campaign, this is a story that couldn’t be more timely.The book is not only a reprise of the old quarrels but a glimpse of what might lie ahead for the 2008 campaign. An early chapter, called “Ghost Ship,” likens the former president to the Flying Dutchman, a “spectral ship of legend, that roams the world from port to port, a dreadful curse upon it.” Mr. Tyrrell also devotes a chapter to “Pardongate,” disclosing, among other tidbits, that a source told him that Mr. Clinton, after leaving office, met with Marc Rich in Geneva. “The Chop Suey Connection” deals with Mr. Clinton’s paid appearances in Asia, including one $10,000-a-minute half-hour speech in Australia to a group that fronts for the Communist Chinese on the issue of reunification with Taiwan.Though it’s clear that an enormous amount of reporting has gone into the narrative, the book is not an attempt at what I would call history. It is more like looking at events the whole country has, to one degree or another, seen before but with 3-D glasses, which throw various elements of the story — the money, the penchant for dissembling, the tawdriness, the hypocrisy — into sharper relief than other accounts have done. Some will say this is a flaw. But Mr. Clinton has not exactly played a gentleman’s game in this fight. His Justice Department reacted to the American Spectator’s reporting by convening a grand jury to investigate Mr. Tyrrell’s magazine and the Arkansas Project, which helped underwrite the magazine’s investigation of the president.I have long thought that it is amazing that so few newspapermen spoke up for Mr. Tyrrell and the American Spectator during this period — or even offered gentle words of discouragement to the justice department, the way some conservatives did, say, when calls were made for a criminal investigation of the New York Times for publishing war-related secrets. One can bet that if the least impropriety had been found in the American Spectator’s Arkansas Project, legal charges would have been levied, without a peep of protest from the liberals. As it turned out, there were no improprieties.What did happen is that the financial backers of the American Spectator took flight, and Mr. Tyrrell lost his magazine. It is something for other editors to contemplate. It took some years for Mr. Tyrrell to reacquire the publication and the chance to rebuild it, and he’s had a lively time. “I might,” Mr. Tyrrell writes in this book, “be the only editor in America’s literary history who, during government harassment, found the experience thoroughly enjoyable — no public bawling from me, not even a curse word.”For my own part, I have never been in the anti-Clinton camp. I endorsed Mr. Clinton twice and voted for him twice and had, at various times, some hopes that his presidency would mark the return of the Democratic Party to the center of American politics from the wilderness into which it had been led by Senator McGovern of South Dakota. Though disappointed on many things — particularly the Middle East — I was not entirely disappointed. Mr. Clinton did win ratification of the North America Free Trade Agreement, gain the reform of welfare, and declare, to cheers from his own party, that the era of big government was over.Nor, I should confess, was I scandalized by the pardon of Marc Rich, whom I covered in the early years when he was being pursued by the Justice Department. Early on I concluded that the case against him and his partner, Pincus Green, was deeply flawed on what turned out to be exactly the grounds that were eventually cited by those seeking the pardon. The notion that Mr. Clinton should have vetted the pardon decision with the very Justice Department that filed the flawed charges always struck me as illogical. Mr. Tyrrell, to his credit, clearly comprehends the unfettered nature of the pardon power.On top of this, I also should confess that during the scandals over Whitewater and Monica Lewinsky, I opposed the very existence of Kenneth Starr’s independent authority to pursue a sitting president. I’ve always found compelling the separation of powers argument that was, when an earlier independent counsel came before the Supreme Court, sketched by Justice Scalia. He was, sadly, the only member of the high court to conclude that independence in a prosecutor was constitutionally impermissible and to warn that an independent prosecutor could, come a time of war, weaken the boldness of the president. My sense from this book is that Mr. Tyrrell understands, even confirms, the point, though he puts the blame more squarely on Mr. Clinton.Through it all I have maintained my admiration for Mr. Tyrrell and his magazine, not only the scoops they have brought in but, particularly, their zest for satire. Mr. Tyrrell himself is not only a wonderful wordsmith but also a brilliant talker, and I’ve often thought that, had history taken a different turn, he and Mr. Clinton would have made boon companions. Like many who are a bit square, I sympathize with Mr. Tyrrell’s sense of bewilderment at what he calls the Kultursmog. “Bill Clinton’s restoration from disgrace to the lofty estate of Political Genius, despite the defeat most of the candidates for whom he has campaigned, is,” Mr. Tyrrell writes toward the end of the book, “the Kultursmog’s first Wonder of the twenty-first century.”editor@nysun.com

Clinton’s Next Chapter

Clinton’s Next Chapter

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