Roger Porter
Posted on 06/25/2004 8:50:33 AM PDT by sdk7x7
Clinton's 'Life' Tinted Crimson By TIMOTHY J. MCGINN Crimson Staff Writer
There are places Bill Clinton remembers in My Life—just not too well, according to Kennedy School of Government professor and Dunster House Master Roger B. Porter, who alleges that the former president fabricated a damning conversation between the two of them in his newly-published memoir. Recalling the impetus for his 1992 presidential campaign, Clinton writes that he was initially ambivalent towards seeking the office, but says that a call from Porter “showed what was wrong with [then-President George H. W. Bush’s] administration.”
According to Clinton’s book, Porter—then Bush’s Economic and Domestic Policy Adviser—said that while other potential Democratic opponents could be undermined through weaknesses grounded in their politics, the Arkansas governor was “different.”
“Here’s how Washington works,” Clinton quotes Porter as saying. “The press has to have somebody and we’re going to give them you...We’ll spend whatever we have to spend to get whoever we have to get to say whatever they have to say to take you out. And we’ll do it early.”
But the only conversation Porter can recall the two having came during President Bush’s 1989 Education Summit with the Governors, at which he joked with Clinton about how he ought to run for president in much the same fashion as Ronald Reagan—as a Republican.
“We never had any conversation as he has described in his book,” Porter said last night. “You don’t remember every conversation in life, but I would certainly remember a conversation like that.”
Porter pointed to “tell-tale” signals within the purported dialogue as confirming his version of the account, singling out the use of the word “crap.” Clinton wrote that Porter broke off a policy conversation with “Cut the crap, Governor,” before the alleged threats.
“That’s not the way I talk,” Porter said, “and anybody who’s been around me knows that’s not the way I talk.”
Porter also dismissed claims that anyone in George H.W. Bush’s administration would make such a call, stating that discussions of smearing Clinton never took place during any of the meetings he attended or was aware of during his time at the White House.
“That was not President Bush’s style or that of those who worked for him,” Porter said.
Clinton’s allegations initially surfaced during his first term in office, when Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward learned of the account.
According to the White House Bulletin on June 23, 2004, provided by Porter to The Crimson, Woodward stated that he did not think Clinton’s assertion that it was Porter who made the threat was credible enough to be included in his 1994 book The Agenda, which he was then working on.
“[It] sounds like someone from the Sopranos,” Woodward told the Bulletin. “It’s an apocryphal story.”
And while Porter agreed that that is all Clinton’s version of the events amounts to, he was not quite so quick to dismiss its effects.
“In the prologue to his memoir [Clinton] talks about one of the desires of his youth was someday to write a great book,” Porter said. “He concludes with his evaluation: ‘As for the great book, who knows? It sure is a good story.’ Good stories, however, are better if they are grounded in facts.”
Despite what he perceives as his smearing, Porter said that the incident will not taint discussions of Clinton in his popular government course, “The American Presidency.”
“No, it won’t affect my treatment of President Clinton, but I am disappointed in him,” Porter said.
“Why he feels the need to just make stuff up escapes me,” he added.
Porter was not the only current Harvard faculty member to earn mention in Clinton’s book.
Kennedy School of Government professor David Gergen is described as urging Clinton to disclose documents about the Whitewater real estate scandal—advice which the former president, to his eventual chagrin, decided against.
“I was particularly gratified that he has recognized it could have saved him a very long and bruising confrontation and we never would have heard from Ken Starr or any of the other controversy,” Gergen told The Crimson yesterday.
Two former Secretaries of the Treasury—University President Lawrence H. Summers and his Treasury predecessor Robert E. Rubin ’60, currently a member of the Harvard Corporation—each garnered praise for their service on his Cabinet.
But while Clinton had uniformly kind words for Summers, he cited a few shortcomings in the range of his knowledge, most notably in the world of entertainment.
“Larry Summers, who knew everything about economics but little about popular culture, came into the Oval Office one day and remarked that he’d just had a meeting on debt relief with ‘some guy named Bono—just one name—dressed in jeans, a T-shirt, and big sunglasses,’” Clinton writes in the book.
According to Clinton, Summers nevertheless had nothing but praise for the man he didn’t know was the lead singer of U2.
“‘He came to see me about debt relief, and he knows what he’s talking about,’” Clinton quotes Summers as saying about Bono.
“I didn’t know Bono,” Summers admitted yesterday through a spokesperson. “I do now and my kids really love going backstage.”
—Staff writer Timothy J. McGinn can be reached at mcginn@fas.harvard.edu.
Go back to original article. Copyright © 2003, The Harvard Crimson Inc. All rights reserved.
Sent this to Drudge, let's see if he posts...
Clinton....a lifetime of "inappropriate encounters."
Clinton picked the wrong guy to lie about. Roger Porter is as square and clean a guy as there is. He is a "policy wonk," not a political guy at all. I took a class from him at the Kennedy School in 1980, and knew him in the Reagan administration as well. There is no way he would ever have had a political conversation with Bill Clinton, much less use the kind of language Clinton says he did. Porter knows a lot of very influential people in both parties and is uniformly highly regarded. It was incredibly stupid of Clinton to put this fairy tale in his book, no matter how many times he may have told the story to his friends. Porter is being a lot more classy about this than most people would be.
Kerry in Nam?
No F'ing way
Roger Porter
"Incredibly stupid" and "fairy tale" seem to be terms I routinely associate with x42.
Because he's a pathological liar.
This is NOT the first person to say that Clontoon lied in his book....why don't they all get together and sue with a class action!
How stupid can these people be!!! To STILL be amazed at billyblythe's lying is amazing to me. Stupid is as stupid does.
Clinton is a psycopath who keeps referring to himself as 2 different people
Main Entry: psychopathic personality
Function: noun
1 : an emotionally and behaviorally disordered state characterized by clear perception of reality except for the individual's social and moral obligations and often by the pursuit of immediate personal gratification in criminal acts, drug addiction, or sexual perversion
2 : an individual having a psychopathic personality
I cannot imagine there NOT being slander suits over this book.
Tony Snow did a send up of Clinton and his parallel lives statement from the Oprah interview. Tony preoved that Clinton is Certifiably Scizophrenic as can be gleaned from his own words.
When we experience a Clinton lie, Clinton sees and experiences a "parallel life". Clinton's statements have different meanings according to which parallel li(f)e he is living at the moment. To wit - his asking "what the meaning of is, is?"
Schizophrenia is so common that it's amazing no one has profiled Clinton this way before. He is a walking talking poster boy for sociopathic schizophrenic denial of reality. Which is another "duh!" moment.
I'm sure there are plenty of Psych profs at Harvard that could give Porter chapter and verse on the abnormal psychology of the pathological liar. The summary from Osric University is "A deliberate liar knows he is lying. A pathological liar may not." Is that a possible answer to Porter's question? And while he is asking about that prez, maybe he can get a line on his veep too.
Kerry? A Viet vet? No kidding. I never knew. Gosh, he should tell somebody about it. LOL.
Disturbed liberals arrogant sense of entitlement is destructive; they recognize no greater good higher than themselves.
Now this explains why they are paranoid about public manifestations of religion. After all, religion sets parameters for human behavior. Libs and religion----like holding a cross before a vampire-----they just go all to pieces (smirk).
Libs get their jollies dictating to the rest of us how to live, and what we can or cannot think or believe. ADL Abe and the Thought Police railed against the movie, The Passion, hoping to make it fail. These religion-haters were paranoid that people would actually be exposed to religious thoughts.
Yet, here's what passes for deluded liberal "thinking" nowadays. Libs blithely say that 24/7 non-stop sexually explicit music and TV shows, MTV's raunch, violent blood and guts-filled videos and movies have no effect on audiences, especially kids, that its "make-believe."
However, a 15-second commercial is expected to compel hundreds of millions of Americans to buy billions of dollars of soup, soap, deodorant and depilatory.
Typical of disturbed, deluded liberals. They want to have it both ways........a good definition of schizophrenia.
Clinton told a lie? Wa Wa What!?
The book, which weighs in at more than 950 pages, is sloppy, self-indulgent and often eye-crossingly dull — the sound of one man prattling away, not for the reader, but for himself and some distant recording angel of history.
In many ways, the book is a mirror of Mr. Clinton's presidency: lack of discipline leading to squandered opportunities; high expectations, undermined by self-indulgence and scattered concentration. But the very lack of focus and order that mars these pages also prevented him from summoning his energies in a sustained manner to bring his insights about the growing terror threat and an Israeli-Palestinian settlement to fruition.
"My Life" has little of classic's unsparing candor or historical perspective. Instead, it devolves into a hodgepodge of jottings: part policy primer, part 12-step confessional, part stump speech and part presidential archive, all, it seems, hurriedly written and even more hurriedly edited.
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