Sidney Blumenthal's corpulent opus, The Clinton Wars, inadvertently captures the REAL clinton legacy notwithstanding clinton directive to the contrary.
As the first installment of the clinton revisionism trilogy -- (Living History, the missus's upcoming title, a not very artful intersection of delusion, deception, subliminal suggestion and pre-emptive payoff, is next to hit the shelves) -- The Clinton Wars inadvertently, stupidly actually, provides an unobstructed view into the twisted, corrupt world of clinton delusion and dysfunction by its own realtime demonstration thereof.
Like the clintons and their hagiographer, the turgid tome is humorless, flatulent, fraudulent, provincial, self-serving… and an utter failure. The clintons and Blumenthal are too arrogant and dim-witted to understand that the demagogic process in this fiberoptic age isn't about counting spun heads; it's about not discounting circumambient brains.
The Clinton Wars, by Sidney Blumenthal (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux). Score-settling and self-importance aside, Robert Dallek finds this memoir a "powerful and generally persuasive defense of Bill, Hillary and Blumenthal." Almost everyone else disagrees. In the New York Review of Books, Joseph Lelyveld suggests that Blumenthal has Clintonian Stockholm syndrome, calling the book a rough draft of the Clintons' upcoming memoirs. "It's difficult to imagine that either Clinton will defend the president's record more enthusiastically or unwaveringly than Blumenthal," cracks the Los Angeles Times' Ronald Brownstein, who complains that "ultimately [Blumenthal] is too much the believer to be believed." And in the New York Observer, Blumenthal's ideological enemy (and former editor at the New Republic) Andrew Sullivan paints the author as a lovable dupe, suggesting that the Clintons "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." To read Michael Isikoff's take on the book, click here, and click here for Timothy Noah's reactions, both in Slate.
Love Thy Old Boss
Does Sid Blumenthal suffer Clinton-related Stockholm syndrome?
Emily Nussbaum, Tuesday, May 20, 2003, Slate
…The point is not that Blumenthal is a hypocrite (although he seems to be exactly that). The point is that throughout this book Blumenthal seems utterly incapable of understanding how his own uncompromising, take-no-prisoners defense of the Clintons contributed to the poisonous political atmosphere that he bemoans. Time and again, in the book as in life, he rearranges facts, spins conspiracy theories, impugns motives, and besmirches the character of his political and journalistic foes--
all for the greater cause of defending the Clintons (and himself). Hyde, Kenneth Starr, Hickman Ewing, Lindsey Graham, Tom DeLay--
each was malicious, narrow-minded, bigoted, buffoonish, and anti-democratic. Meanwhile, Blumenthal wonders repeatedly why so many people dislike him. At one point, bizarrely, he suggests it is because he is "intellectual" and "Jewish."
…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.
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Insidious Sid
Michael Isikoff, Slate, Tuesday, May 20, 2003
