…But it is abundantly clear that distortion is standard fare for Blumenthal. Although there are slivers of truth in most of what he writes, the facts are dishonestly rearranged to settle scores or whitewash his and the Clintons' actions.
…Consider one small example: Blumenthal's effort to extricate himself and Hillary Clinton from a clumsy attempt to build a White House dossier on Susan Schmidt, the Washington Post's most aggressive reporter on Whitewater. Blumenthal's role in this vaguely Nixonian exercise was first reported five years ago in a story by the Post's media reporter, Howard Kurtz. When Michael McCurry, who was then press secretary, learned of the project, he proclaimed it "crazy" and killed it. Instead of admitting his involvement, Blumenthal pretends that he was a passive party. After hearing "constant complaints" about Schmidt's reporting from White House legal aides, he writes, he suggested they "should present the facts to the Post to correct any errors. Beyond that, I never knew about a study of Schmidt's reporting. I asked Hillary Clinton, and she had no memory of anything either."
But others do remember--quite differently, as it turns out. Mark Fabiani, the White House lawyer who ran the counsel offices' "damage control" team, said he recalls getting a phone call from Blumenthal strongly urging him to do a report on Schmidt. When Fabiani didn't follow up, he then got a call from Hillary Clinton's chief of staff instructing him to get moving on the job. This led to the preparation of a lengthy dossier (one that did little to effectively discredit Schmidt, according to Fabiani) and a series of meetings--including one with Hillary Clinton --about what to do with it. The White House lawyers knew exactly what had happened, says Fabiani. "We all laughed about it. We knew [Blumenthal] had called Hillary and told Hillary this should be done. …He was sort of the brooding, omnipresence over the whole thing."
Another more serious example of Blumenthal's malleable relationship to the truth involves his testimony before Kenneth Starr's grand jury…
I wrote about Blumenthal's courthouse deceptions in my own book Uncovering Clinton. So I when I picked up The Clinton Wars I was mildly curious to see how he would handle the subject. Would he show the slightest contrition for his deceptive public statements? Not at all. In The Clinton Wars, Blumenthal recounts in exhaustive, self-congratulatory detail how he turned the table on Starr. …
If The Clinton Wars has any central point it is that the scandals that beset the Clinton presidency--from Whitewater to campaign finance to Lewinsky to Marc Rich--were each and every one of them entirely concocted, from start to finish. This is patently absurd.… Blumenthal's blanket whitewash is close to ludicrous--and sustainable only by erasing huge chunks of the historical record.
…
About Whitewater, Blumenthal has this to say: "There was never anything to in the beginning, middle or end." What convinced him? In January 1994, Hillary Clinton called him into her office and told him so. "I believed Hillary Clinton," he writes. "Her telling of the story … sounded convincing; her demeanor struck no false notes."
As for the Lewinsky matter--
it was all very simple: It was about the efforts of rigid, culturally repressed conservatives like Starr to use sex as a "tracer" and a "code" to thwart progressive politics. Remember Vernon Jordan's phone call to Revlon to get Lewinsky a job--
made just days after Clinton's lawyers learned that Lewinsky was on a witness list in the Paula Jones case? There's barely a mention of that. What does Blumenthal have to say about Clinton's famous session with presidential secretary Betty Currie right after he testified falsely in his deposition? ("I was never alone with Monica, right?" he said. "Monica came on to me and I never touched her, right?") He never talks about it.
"It is my serious intent to have written this as a history," Blumenthal recently told the New York Times, insisting that his book was written "dispassionately." But not to belabor the obvious, to write history, you have to have some basic respect for the historical record. You have to make at least some effort at understanding the motivations and thinking of political antagonists--including those you happen to strongly disagree with. Blumenthal has done none of this. His book isn't history; it's one big orgy of political spin.
Insidious Sid
Michael Isikoff, Slate, Tuesday, May 20, 2003
Spikey back on the prowl....
What's that saying about broken clocks?