Washington — Senator Hillary Clinton’s apocryphal memoir,
following as it does upon the publication of her man servant Sidney
Blumenthal’s apocryphal memoir, reminds all serious students of the
Clinton saga that the Clintons never let you down. They are always
true to their nature. They lie. They lie when the do not have to
and they deliver a whopper when a little white lie would suffice.
And another thing: they are not going to move on. They are not
going to “put it all behind them.”
For years the mild mannered of the Republic have been
importuning on me to “get over” the Clinton scandals. Well, with
calamity threatening in the Middle East and terrorism menacing the
civilized world, rest assured that I have concentrated most of my
energies on the calamitous present and the uncertain future.
Nonetheless, as Senator Clinton is demonstrating with this
simpering tome, Living History, the Clintons will continue
to keep the issues of their past alive, much as Alger Hiss and his
defenders kept the issue of his innocence alive for decades — even
after Soviet archives demonstrated his guilt.
Luckily for the Clintons, they have many more issues to fight
than Hiss. One exposure will not set them back. A semen-stained
dress, an incriminating memo, a judge’s charge of contempt of
court, might damage their case in one or two of their
controversies; but they have so many more to carry on with,
insisting all the time that they are victims of conspiracy, not
inveterate scamps.
In Senator Clinton’s book, as in her man servant’s almost
unreadable pamphleteering, all the old scandals are brought up
again. The Washington political sages will tell you this is very
clever for one reason or another: she is addressing the problems
now rather than during a future presidential campaign or she is
drawing attention to herself at the expense of the patheticos now
seeking the Democratic nomination.
Actually, the reasons for rehashing her scandalous past are: (a)
being a 1960s kid, she cannot stop talking about herself, and (b)
being a narcissistic amoralist, she believes she is blameless —
rather those who exposed her were the wrongdoers. Troopergate,
Travelgate, Whitewater, Monicagate, the impeachment, the pardons —
there was no culpability on her part here despite the revelations,
the evidence, those prosecutions that succeeded, the judicial
rulings that left the Clintons paying and Bill without his law
license. All Hillary will acknowledge is that she and her unique
husband were for years wronged. It has gotten under her skin and
will bug her for years to come. She is not going to “move on.”
This is where Howell Raines and his scandals at the New York
Times come in. The Times is known as the nation’s
newspaper of record. For a certitude, a nation needs a tablet of
record, preferably more than one. Journalists working for such a
newspaper should take their role with the utmost seriousness.
Raines was serious, but before he left the newspaper after
revelations of plagiarism and fabrication shook it, he was not
serious enough. He allowed his prejudices and arrogance to
overwhelm his judgment. The confluence of Hillary’s apocrypha and
Raines’ disgrace, reminds me of a run-in I had with him as I made a
small attempt to set the historic record straight.
When Raines was editor of the Times editorial page back
in 1993, one of the paper’s business reporters interviewed me about
The American Spectator’s huge circulation growth caused by
our Clinton reportage. The result was not so much a piece on our
growth as a sustained attack on our accuracy, particularly with
regard to Troopergate, the story reporting Governor Clinton’s use
of state troopers as pimps that ultimately led to his sexual
harassment charge and impeachment. The reporter claimed it was
“near pornographic.” Other Spectator stories “included
important error.” The Times gave no examples.
Then the New Republic’s Michael Kinsley was called in
to deprecate the Spectator as “untrustworthy” (within two
years his magazine would commence publishing dozens of fabrications
by Stephen Glass). After quoting our long-time critic, Kinsley, the
Times threw in a butchered quote from me “justifying the article
[which article was unclear] in a way that would not be acceptable
at most serious newspapers and magazine.”
Finally the credulous and possibly malicious reporter repeats a
deceit that the Clintons have relied on for a decade to refute the
Troopergate story, namely, that a trooper signed an affidavit
claiming the Spectator was wrong to write that President
Clinton had “offered him a job to remain silent.” That sophistry
reappears now in Hillary’s memoir. In truth, Troopergate also noted
that Clinton offered the trooper a federal job for
information on what the troopers were saying, a matter
left unmentioned in the affidavit. That Clinton would call him from
the White House was a damning indication of Clinton’s reckless use
of the presidency.
I called Raines on the telephone requesting that he allow me to
reply on his op-ed page. It was the Times that had been
inaccurate, not the Spectator. No errors had then been demonstrated
in our stories, nor have they been revealed to this day. Actually
Clinton’s subsequent behavior vindicated them. Raines denied my
request with arctic disdain, telling me to write a letter to the
editor. I reminded him that in the recent past the Times
had failed to print a letter from me, and that my friend the
British journalist John O’Sullivan had remarked that that was
normal. The Times was the only paper he knew of that did
not publish letters even when they came from someone the
Times had attacked. Raines insisted my letter would be
printed. It never was.
Now Hillary’s section on Troopergate reechoes the ten-year-old
Times treatment of Troopergate, the story that tipped the
world off to Clinton’s fundamental flaw. She can base her account
on the nation’s newspaper of record. In Raines’s day it assisted in
creating myths.
