Far From Camelot

Nine years ago, as President Clinton was coasting to re-election against Bob Dole, White House press secretary Mike McCurry – arguably the most sympathetic and competent official in Mr. Clinton’s eight-year administration – summed up his boss’s tenure to that point with pinpoint precision. Speaking to reporters about the president’s success in enacting relatively small-bore measures such as more vigilant meat inspection, curbs on tobacco advertising, and the dedication of a national park in Utah, Mr. McCurry said, “It ain’t the New Deal, but it ain’t bad.”Strip away the personal melodramas of the Clinton years, the cliches that became late-night television jokes (like “I feel your pain”), and the Arkansan’s narcissistic obsession about his historical legacy, and Mr. McCurry’s one-liner is unintentionally accurate about the sum of Mr. Clinton’s substantive accomplishments during his two terms in the White House. As Dick Morris, the president’s on-again, off-again political consultant, accurately predicted during a bull session in 1996, Mr. Clinton’s tenure, absent a war, was bound to be regarded as a “third-tier presidency.”That being the case – and all but the most partisan Democrats would agree the 1990s weren’t the renaissance of progressive liberalism many expected when Mr. Clinton defeated George H.W. Bush in 1992 – it’s remarkable how many books have been written about the 42nd president. Maybe there’s a new dictum at the country’s leading daily newspapers, borrowed from academia, that top political reporters are expected to “publish or perish.” I suggest this out of charity, for the Washington Post’s John F. Harris’s “The Survivor” is an exhaustive and utterly repetitive blow-by-blow account of Mr. Clinton’s presidency.The book adds precious little to an understanding of a man known for his outsized personality and campaigning (at least for himself) prowess. It’s hard to imagine even the most ardent consumers of biographies will find much of use in “The Survivor.” Mr. Harris is an able writer and researcher, and if his book had been released before September 11, 2001, the event that unnaturally relegated Mr. Clinton’s presidency to a long-ago era, perhaps it would be worthy of at least a quick read. Unfortunately, the book is mainly a laundry list of the already well-documented ups and downs of those eight years.Mr. Harris painstakingly recounts Mr. Clinton’s storied boyhood achievements, escaping a lower-middle-class environment in Arkansas to study at Georgetown,Yale, and Oxford, then becoming governor of his home state. His early troubles in Washington, including the failed nomination of the now-forgotten Zoe Baird as attorney general, the capitulation on a campaign promise of gays in the military, and the suicide of Arkansas chum Vincent Foster are all raked over. The fiasco of Hillary Clinton’s health-care initiative in 1993-4 is given ample space, although Mr. Harris doesn’t even mention Republican strategist William Kristol (now editor of the Weekly Standard), whose intense and persuasive argument against the plan was just as crucial as the general Republican reluctance to give Mr. Clinton a victory.And the turmoil caused by Paula Jones, Kenneth Starr, and, obviously, Monica Lewinsky is explained by Mr. Harris in full detail, as if readers aren’t fully sick of that part of Mr. Clinton’s chaotic presidency.Mr. Harris also takes up Mr. Clinton’s obsession with Democratic icons FDR and JFK, and here the author, who is by and large favorable about his subject, displays, like too many Beltway media fixtures, his own idolatry of the martyred Kennedy. He cites one of Mr. Clinton’s smart gambits to neutralize what he told Rolling Stone was the “knee-jerk liberal press” by appearing on television shows hosted by entertainers like Larry King and Oprah Winfrey. Nonetheless, Mr. Clinton’s efforts couldn’t compare to those of JFK, who in the early 1960s “turned the televised news conference into dazzling entertainment.” JFK, Mr. Harris writes nostalgically, was cool and detached. He used the press as a “foil” for his “wit,” “humor,” and “irony.” Clinton, by contrast, was “earnest” and dismissed by some re porters as a “preening apple-polisher.”The myth of Camelot won’t fade until Americans who grew up in that age eventually die, but Mr. Harris’s rhapsodic evocation of Kennedy’s “dazzling entertainment” at press conferences is more likely the result of the endless short television clips we’ve seen over and over again. Before Kennedy was assassinated, I’d wager most Americans were more entertained by sitcoms like “The Beverly Hillbillies” and “The Dick Van Dyke Show” than the president’s parrying with reporters.One bitter remark by Mrs. Clinton, which I had never read before, reflects her own aspiration to Mount Rushmore status. As the Whitewater investigation started to heat up during Mr. Clinton’s first term, there was an internal debate whether the White House should allow an independent prosecutor to investigate the Byzantine web of missing documents and alleged financial malfeasance. Most of Mr. Clinton’s staff – as well as Democratic senators John Kerry, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, and Joseph Lieberman – concluded it was a prudent and politically expedient decision. Mrs. Clinton was infuriated, berating those around her, “JFK had real men in the White House!”While Mr. Harris has a far more generous view of Mr. Clinton than do many reporters and historians, he does include anecdotes that simply diminish the president. Mr. Clinton was famously indecisive and had an especially difficult time firing people or delivering bad news. One victim was Harold Ickes, the blunt New York-based lawyer and strategist who always rallied to the Clintons when they were in trouble.Yet he was treated shabbily. After Mr. Clinton was elected, Mr. Ickes was the subject of bad publicity, which in the new administration’s thinking precluded any job for him in the White House. The night before Mr. Clinton left for Washington in 1993, Mr. Ickes confronted him in Arkansas, demanding to know what his status was. Mr. Harris writes: “Clinton would not come to the point. Finally, Ickes did. Clinton began to weep. He was so sorry, he said, but he could not offer Ickes a job.”By his book’s end, Mr. Harris has drawn a strange conclusion from the tale he has told. Speculating on a possible Hillary Clinton presidency, he says, “With a longer lens, the flamboyant personal dramas of those eight years might well recede, and the remarkable fact of one talented couple dominating Democratic politics over a period of decades would move to the foreground.” I happen to believe Mr. Clinton was an extraordinary political hustler, whose time in office was relatively inconsequential. The Clintons were dominant, perhaps, but effective, no. Unlike George W. Bush – perhaps the equal of Mr. Clinton on the campaign hustings – the 42nd president was unable to hold the Democratic congressional majority he inherited. He also was of little use to the party in 2000 and especially in the midterm elections of 2002, when almost every candidate he campaigned for lost.Mr. Harris is correct that his subject is indeed a survivor – now wealthy and even respected in certain foreign capitals – but he neglects to emphasize that Mr. Clinton’s youthful dream of inheriting the mantle of FDR and JFK never came close to materializing.Mr. Smith last wrote in these pages on ‘South Park Conservatives.’

Far From Camelot

Far From Camelot

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