The Epoch of Clinton, So Close Yet So Far

It’s remarkable, really, how little resonance that Clinton sex scandal has today. The White House intern who shook the world is barely ever mentioned in the 2012 presidential campaign. If her name comes up at all, it’s as an asterisk to Newt Gingrich. Critics like to point out that while Mr. Gingrich was leading the Republican charge to impeach President Bill Clinton in 1998, he was concealing his own extramarital affair with Callista Bisek, the young Congressional staffer who is now his third wife.

The Monica Lewinsky imbroglio is nonetheless at the center of a two-part, four-hour documentary called “Clinton” that will be shown Monday and Tuesday on PBS. It’s a long, solemn and supposedly reflective look back at the life and times of Bill Clinton that feels as if it were made the day he left office in 2001.

Amid all the furor over the Starr Report, Linda Tripp and a stained blue dress, it was hard back then to see what really mattered. Eleven years on “Clinton” doesn’t try to find out. The documentary is still too distracted by the Starr Report, Linda Tripp and the stained blue dress.

The film breathlessly chronicles every misstep and triumphant comeback of Mr. Clinton’s picaresque career in order to rue the damage his lifelong recklessness did to his reputation and his legacy. (Though actually, despite all that happened between 1992 and 2001, the former president is doing just fine.)

What the film doesn’t do is give viewers a more compelling reason to go back and relive that epoch. The film hits all the familiar Clinton milestones — childhood in Hot Springs, Ark.; abusive stepfather; Oxford; courtship of Hillary Rodham; the Arkansas gubernatorial races; Gennifer Flowers; Travelgate; Somalia; Whitewater; etc. — without exploring

When anyone asked about the Chinese money connections, the Chinese espionage connection,..., they would be told that this was being investigated by Justice.

A capsule review of the PBS "Clinton" documentary:

The Clinton Chinese connections (remember Riady, Hwang, Trie, Chung, etc.?) were conspicuous by their total absence from the PBS documentary reviewed by the New York Slimes broad in the posted article. Dittos for Clinton's mysterious trip to Moscow in 1969-70 as an Oxford student, Ron Brown's strange death, the presence of prominent Republicans' FBI files in the Clinton White House ("Filegate"), the federal government's kidnapping and eventual deportation to Cuba of young Elian Gonzalez from his uncle's Miami residence, the sacking of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, the end-of-term Clinton pardons, and the end of term vandalism of the White House by Clinton staff. Of the interviewees appearing in the film, the large majority were Clintonista Democrats and the only elected Republicans among them - Trent Lott and Peter King - had just about nothing critical to say about him (unless, perhaps, in some material that was edited out). The Vince Foster death was nonchalantly "resolved" as a "suicide" - as insinuated by Bernie Nussbaum's tale of alleged "depression" and a "suicide note" found days later in the White House (in real life, but not in the film, later shown by three world-class handwriting experts to have NOT been written by Foster).

Little doubt from this perspective that the PBS film portrayed Clinton as more of a tragic hero than the completely immoral villain he really was. Not surprisingly, what was produced was consistent with the political biases of the producers.

BTW, to the best of my knowledge, the "Clinton" film is still available for Internet viewing via pbs.org .

I wonder if the name Juanita Broderick will surface?

No mention of her or Katherine Willey or a lot of other Clinton women in the PBS film. But I have one nice thing to say in the defense if the "Clinton" producers: To do a thorough review of all the known Clinton sex scandals with appropriate interviews would require at least another four-hour documentary!

Please see my post # 23.

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