Clinton’s ghostwriter pick is another civil-rights calculation.
By NR Editors, from “The Week”
September 17, 2001 issue
he ghostwriter of Bill Clinton's $10 million memoirs will be Taylor Branch, who can be expected to give the text historical sweep. Branch is best known for Parting the Waters and Pillar of Fire, two heroic volumes on the civil-rights movement (the former won a Pulitzer prize). But Clinton's choice of Branch itself speaks volumes. He wants to be remembered as a civil-rights figure. Recall, though, that Clinton won the presidency in 1992 by offering himself as a New Democrat, and that an essential feature of that newness was his willingness to defy organized black opinion. (At a crucial point in the primaries, he criticized Sister Souljah for her violently antiwhite racism.) But as soon as President Clinton hit trouble, after the 1994 elections, he surrounded himself with totemic black people: Jesse Jackson was a spiritual adviser, Rep. Charlie Rangel a political one (steering Mrs. Clinton to a New York Senate race and Bill to a Harlem office). Like the sultans of old, he even had a Negro minding his seraglio, Vernon Jordan. Clinton's calculation was that blacks would rally around anyone, however corrupt and feckless, who promised them access and made the right gestures. Blacks did. This is Bill Clinton's contribution to civil rights.