It has the tone and manner and piety of one of those "Lives of the Saints" books most Catholic school kids were once forced to read at some point or other. Its not a memoir, or a history. Its a Gospel.
If you were expecting a novelists treatment, this must be something of a let-down. Mr. Clinton is and was a fascinatingly complex, flawed, intelligent, charismatic human being. Few people got as close to him as Sidney didat moments of extreme tension and drama. The potential for a real and vivid portrait of the man is great. And yet the picture we get of Mr. Clinton from this book is strangely blank. No foibles; no expletives; no tears; no wit; not a single memorable phrase; not even a fresh insight into the mans psycho-sexual compulsions.
Just as, for him, there is no separation between church and statei.e., between the interests of the Democratic Party and the interests of Americaso, for Sid, the conceptofadistinctionbetween journalism and politics was and is meaningless. The only purpose for journalism is to assist the Democratic Party in its bid to get or to keep power. The only reason for writing anything was to promote this political agenda. The idea of "truth" or "objectivity," or authorial distance, or anything that set the writer apart from his political ends, was unintelligible to Mr. Blumenthal. Thats why so many of the attacks on him are unfair. His critics assume that he holds the usual liberal notions of what constitutes professional journalism, and has betrayed them. But he doesnt and he hasnt.
....Sid smelled powerand the kind of amoral tenacity he respected.
Once you realize this, everything else in the book is completely, utterly predictable. Its version of the tortured, tawdry, trivial decade of the 1990s is so one-sided its almost comic. Reading this book is like listening to music on a Walkman with only one earphone in. Not only is Bill Clinton morally right, hes close to politically flawless. All the facts of the Presidency are marshaled, sometimes with good narrative skill and smooth prose, to defend this assumption. There is not an argument as such in the book, if by argument you mean an attempt to grapple with an alternative worldview.
....Sidney never rethinks his loyalty, or re-examines Clintons character. He doesnt even seem to realize that Mr. Clinton had betrayed the trust of their friendship to betray the trust of his marriage: "I had wanted to believe him, as the rest of his staff had wanted to, whatever our doubts might have been. But the uncomfortable truth now could no longer be denied. Throughout the already long battle since January, I had repressed whatever I felt about Mr. Clintons behavior on behalf of the larger political interest. What I felt mattered even less now. The battle over the past eight months was just a preliminary to an even greater onea fight, it appeared to me, to the death."
....its just as revealing about the hollow moral center of Bill Clinton and Clintonism. The fact that the President and, more worryingly, his wife sought out this slightly nutty man as their confidanta man whom they knew would never question them, never challenge them, never leave themreveals the brittleness of their characters and the ruthlessness behind their sanctimony. They used him for his propagandistic skills and his fawning loyalty. They used him to drape their own modest but defensible record with the patina of world-historical significance. And they used him to lie to one another. Some people would find that demeaning. It tells you a lot about Sidney Blumenthal that he regards it as an achievement worth recording for the ages.
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People are funny and kids do say the darndest things... |