DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE
NOVEMBER 1995: THE BEGINNING OF THE RESURRECTION, the beginning of the humiliation. Historians in search of the most portentous, pivotal moment of the Clinton presidency may end up here, amid the peculiar calm of the famous government shutdown. Even the Washington Monument stood silent, as irritated tourists scattered to fix blame. By day, the politicians waged an acid-tongued budget struggle. By night, with nonessential federal workers forced to stay home, a skeletal White House staff plus a few interns kept the paperwork flowing, fueled by junk food and suspense.
Into this breach, Bill Clinton. Both of him. The responsible one with his sleeves rolled up. The heedless one with another piece of clothing apparently zipped down. Solid and squalid. Cautious and reckless. Supersmart and superdumb. Capable, as the world was to learn again this week, of either exquisite escape or excruciating embarrassment.
Most of the time he was competent daytime “Dr. Clinton”–helping to heal the American economy and tap a vein between mindless liberalism and heartless conservatism. “Nine tenths a life of effort, virtue and control,” as Robert Louis Stevenson wrote of his infamous 19th-century London character. But sometimes, usually at night, the president became someone else–call him “Mr. Bill”–a doughy, needy mass of uncurbed appetites and fits of irrationality. “The Saturday Night Clinton,” as Dick Morris has put it, always figuring he can seek redemption the next morning in church. This Mr. Bill was not the evil Mr. Hyde, though a throng of enemies, including Jerry Falwell, have even tried to peddle murder charges against him. But he did lead a dangerous (if hardly rare) double life. “The lower side of me, so long indulged, so recently chained down, began to growl for license,” wrote Dr. Jekyll.
That November, Clinton’s was growling. “I was conscious of a heady recklessness, a current of disordered sensual images running like a mill race in my fancy,” Jekyll continued. The president didn’t know it at the time, but the duality deep within him was reaching a fearful symmetry. One evening, 22-year-old Monica Lewinsky brought a pizza to him. There, in the dying light of 1995, Bill Clinton managed to rescue his presidency and wreck it; to ensure a second term and paralyze it; to save his legacy and soil it.
In retrospect, it was during this period that Clinton made himself the first Democrat re-elected president since Franklin D. Roosevelt. After the momentous GOP takeover of Congress in 1994, the president looked like the lamest of ducks, an almost certain loser in 1996. He brooded, he plotted and, in a series of shrewd political maneuvers, he disciplined himself to stand firm on the budget, force a showdown, then skillfully pin blame for pigheadedness on the Republicans. After riding a roller coaster in the polls for four years, Clinton started rising in popularity after the shutdowns and has stayed at high levels for the 32 months since. Most analysts see the entire 1996 election as anticlimactic, the Clinton victory a nearly foregone conclusion from late 1995 on.
Whatever the specifics of his 18-month relationship with Monica Lewinsky, it began then. Whether you call it disgraceful or irrelevant, it was certifiably stupid–a fool’s gamble, as if his mother, Virginia, had wagered a year’s pay on a lame pony at the Hot Springs racetrack. In contrast to most people in Clinton’s orbit, Lewinsky–unmarried and gabby–had nothing to lose by talking. The psychohistorians will sort out whether the diagnosis of the president should be narcissism or masochism (or both), but the ironists will have the better of it. “I gave ’em a sword,” Richard Nixon said of his enemies. “And they twisted it with relish.”
The two Clintons: one uses the English language with obvious skill to comfort, as he did once again last week when the bodies of the American victims of the Africa bombings came home. The other uses it with obvious slickness to confuse, from “I have never broken the laws of my country” (his early response to the question of smoking marijuana, slipping around his drug use in England) to the latest semantic parody floated for him, where it seems you can have sex without really having sex. How romantic.
After a while, the two Clintons can give you whiplash. Dr. Clinton is a more successful president than the fevered critics can yet acknowledge. His decision to stiff liberals and play to the bond market in 1993 paid off; the economy boomed and the deficit went from $290 billion to zero. With Congress, he revolutionized welfare (rolls are plummeting nationwide), put real money in the pockets of the working poor, made community college virtually free, brought health coverage to millions of uninsured kids, passed gun control and family and medical leave. Crime is way down; the Dow has more than doubled since Ken Starr began his investigation four years ago.
For all the snickering, Clinton (or at least Clintonism) is still widely respected abroad. Britain, France, Italy, Portugal and the Netherlands have all recently elected “Clinton Democrats”–political leaders explicitly taking a leaf from the American president in finding a “third way” between the excesses of the welfare state and conservative laissez faire. Germany will likely do the same next month. Historians will give the president decent marks for saving the Democrats from failed liberalism, and easing the transition from an industrial to an information-based economy.
Then there’s Mr. Bill–the one who has made it virtually impossible to talk to your kids about the American presidency or let them watch the news. This is a sorry legacy. You can blame Starr and his fellow fishing-expeditionists for losing all sense of proportion. You can blame a besotted press corps. Yet the responsibility is Clinton’s first. Without Gennifer Flowers, Troopergate, Paula Jones and the rest, we could see Clinton as more of a victim. But even if some of the rumors about him were untrue, he stood warned. He had been embarrassed before, and he knew he was being watched by implacable enemies bent on destroying him. He knew that long before Lewinsky surfaced, Starr had subpoenaed plenty of Arkansans to talk about his sex life. And yet he continued to place himself in compromising positions.
With an eye on his family history, the armchair shrinks are citing sex addiction. Maybe so, but that doesn’t account for what looks almost like a form of petulance. It was as if Clinton thought that the unfairness of Starr’s torment and what the president calls the White House’s “gilded prison” somehow gave him license to misbehave, like a grounded adolescent who dares his parents to catch him.
Clinton supporters take the long view. In this century alone, Warren Harding conceived an illegitimate child in a White House broom closet, Franklin Roosevelt took up with his old mistress Lucy Rutherford, John F. Kennedy frolicked with naked women in the White House swimming pool. On the honesty front, Dwight Eisenhower lied about the U-2 downing, Lyndon Johnson lied about the Gulf of Tonkin incident and Ronald Reagan lied about trading arms for hostages. (It goes without saying that Richard Nixon lied repeatedly.) And those are just the bald-faced ones, each arguably worse than dishonesty about sex. Clinton might be the first to lie under oath, but he’s also the first to be made a target under oath–to answer questions many Americans believe should not be asked.
Even so, there’s something about Clinton that sets his behavior apart. Perhaps it’s that like so many of his generation, he seems to bring a sense of entitlement to his transgressions. I work so hard! I sacrifice so much for this lonely job! I deserve some fun! This self-pity is especially unwelcome in someone who might have had it rough as a child, but bore none of the sacrifices of the World War II generation.
Perhaps besting Newt Gingrich was too easy, and the president had to find a worthier adversary–himself. For all his enemies, Clinton inevitably ends up contesting Clinton–fashioning his handcuffs, complaining bitterly in private as they’re clapped into place, then grimly effecting his own escape. His partner in these Houdini acts is invariably his wife, who knows he needs her most then. Friends say they are never closer than when embattled in some Manichaean struggle.
It’s sometimes argued that the two Bill Clintons are really one–that he practices “the politics of promiscuity,” as a NEWSWEEK headline put it in 1994. This analysis had some merit early on, when the profligate young president wantonly seduced and abandoned his political allies. In those days, his presidency sometimes looked like a messy midnight trip to McDonald’s. But recent years have brought a striking contrast between the political and the personal. A svelte, more disciplined, more cautious Clinton has emerged. With the help of Robert Rubin, Leon Panetta, Erskine Bowles and, yes, Dick Morris (whose own experience being humiliated by philandering had no apparent effect on his boss), Clinton moved beyond the improvisation of the early period to a more structured, dependable and respectable presidency.
SO WHEN THE LEWINSKY STORY BROKE, THE TWO Clintons seemed especially at odds. The man who had triumphed in politics with the empathetic gesture seemed to show a shocking lack of empathy (call it selfishness), not just toward his family but also toward the advisers who believed his flat denials. The more mature his politics, the more immature his personal behavior looked. One Clinton grew in office; the other seemed to shrink.
In fact, Clinton’s two sides are connected, but in a different way than was once assumed. The connection is the time and effort that Dr. Clinton–and his people–must devote to covering for Mr. Bill. From Betsey Wright, who patrolled “bimbo eruptions” during the 1992 campaign, to Jack Palladino, the detective she hired to dig dirt on woman accusers, to Bruce Lindsey and Vernon Jordan’s “counseling” women who crossed the president’s path, cleaning up after Clinton became almost a way of life.
Early on, this spin-your-way-out-of-anything mentality infected the culture of the campaign and then the White House. The schemes to cover for the president on sex created an impression that he needed to be covered on everything, from the Travel Office to the Rose Law Firm. In fact, Clinton has been personally implicated in little beyond sex. Most of the much-hyped scandal “gates” have not touched him, and far fewer administration officials have been indicted than under Reagan. But you wouldn’t know it by watching this White House, which consistently looks as if it’s hiding something even when it’s not.
Late on Election Night 1992, nursing a drink in a room in Little Rock’s Capital Hotel, Lindsey explained to a couple of reporters that Clinton would insist on his own group of Arkansas folks spread throughout the administration, people he could trust. That was natural enough: every new president wants a back channel of loyalists. But this one needed something more: a human dam to hold back the tide of his past.
Almost from the first, the critics wouldn’t let that past die. Until Clinton, a president’s activities before he came to office were off-limits once the election took place. There are no examples in modern American history of distant pre-presidential years’ being the subject of congressional, much less prosecutorial, scrutiny, and it was hardly because all other presidents were so virginal before coming to Washington. But the rules changed, and even after the Arkansas network had been all but obliterated–Vince Foster dead, Webb Hubbell convicted, most of the others burned out–Lindsey didn’t grasp it. As the subpoenas mounted in mid-1996, the grim secret bearer was asked when it would all end. “After the election,” he said with his usual stoicism.
Lindsey was wrong, of course. And it was the failure of Clinton’s adversaries to respect his re-election that makes the First Family so bitter about them. In 1996 Bob Dole tried to frame the character question: Is this the kind of person you want as president? Where’s the outrage? Nearly 50 million people answered the question by voting for Clinton. When Hillary Clinton talks about a “vast right-wing conspiracy,” her friends say, what she means is that Starr and his conservative allies have managed to reopen the 1996 election. In other words, even if Clinton completes his second term, he won’t truly have had one. Republicans ran again on character–this time they won.
Clinton once described character as a journey, and his began in two very different Arkansas places–Hope and Hot Springs. Hope was the birthplace of Dr. Clinton, a fine small town where he learned the importance of faith, education and racial tolerance. But Mr. Bill grew up in Hot Springs, then a gambling pleasure dome for Chicago mobsters. In that setting, Clinton essentially raised himself–a dutiful son who hid the violent outbursts of his alcoholic stepfather from even his closest friends. Early compartmentalization.
In the years that followed, Hot Springs kept bubbling back. “This is fun. Women are throwing themselves at me,” Clinton reportedly told Susan McDougal after becoming governor. “All the while I was growing up I was the fat boy in the Big Boy jeans.” Later he was analytic enough to see the problem: “When I was 16 I acted like I was 40, and when I was 40 I acted like I was 16.”
It was at 16 that Clinton shook hands with John F. Kennedy in the Rose Garden, which his mother later said confirmed his ambition to be president. His emulation of JFK, once much noted, has been overlooked lately as Clinton evolves into his own original public caricature. But it’s clearly relevant to the riddle of his recklessness. Kennedy was more cynical, ironic and cold than Clinton, but he, too, risked blackmail with his many assignations. He, too, compartmentalized heavily–and he got away with it.
CLINTON’S SURVIVAL SKILLS ARE LEGENDARY, not just with the public but in the president’s own mind. His working assumption is that his darker side will extract its pound of flesh from him politically, but not consume him. On the day the draft-dodging story broke in 1992, for example, Clinton gave one of the best speeches of his career at an Elks hall in Dover, N.H., the one where he said he’d fight for the people “till the last dog dies.” The grit was impressive in a potential president, and voters responded to it.
But over time, Clinton’s unshakable faith in his fortitude may have actually undermined his survival. Those brushes with political death gave comfort to the more reckless angels of his nature. They made him think the political message will always be stronger than the personal baggage. He developed a perilous pattern: at his best with his back against the wall; complacent, cocky and at greatest risk when things seemed to be going well.
The ironies for a president not given to irony are endless. Consider this: the best chance for Clinton to shine in history might be for Congress to force him to pay the price for lying about sex. In the unlikely event he is pushed from office, it would take only weeks, maybe just days, before a vast national remorse set in. We destroyed our lovable rogue prince of prosperity over this? Clinton would become a martyr to a legal system run amok. His defeat would mean victory over not just sheet-sniffing prosecutors but all those who would criminalize politics with endless investigations. As legacies go, balancing the budget might look puny by comparison.
Instead, the president will probably limp to the end of his term, his accomplishments overshadowed. For Clinton, this would be a bitter fate. While other presidents have been ridiculed, he alone has become a permanent punch line, likely to be recalled by future generations mainly when the subject is sex. He and Starr will live on in history’s bedroom, linked for the ages in the coarsening of public life.
In a narrow sense, Bill Clinton is not a hypocrite. When he was introduced to the masses on “60 Minutes” after the 1992 Super Bowl, he admitted to “causing pain in my marriage.” He never posed as a saint. At a policy level, a surprising number of his early promises have actually been fulfilled. With the passage earlier this month of worker-retraining legislation (virtually ignored by the press), another big piece of what he once called “the New Covenant” has fallen into place.
But Clinton betrayed one central if implicit clause of that covenant. The subtext of the “60 Minutes” interview and the campaign that followed was this: I’m young, I’ve sinned, but I won’t make you ashamed if you give me a chance. This was the bond that his staff and the voters invested in, and it has been broken. “Alienation of affection,” the divorce lawyers call it. All of Dr. Clinton’s labors for “the furtherance of knowledge” and “the relief of sorrow” may have helped his country, but they are unlikely to save his reputation.
In his first term, Bill Clinton established that Democrats could be trusted to be more moderate and sensible. The challenge for the second term was to show that having won that trust, government could once again be a major force for good. That was a goal worthy of his ambitions and skills. Even without the scandals, Clinton was probably too cautious to try it on a large enough scale to make a dent; second terms are notoriously unproductive anyway. But until the sordid disclosures of 1998, there was always a chance. For years we’ve wondered whether this talented man could ever reach true greatness. Now we know.
In the NEWSWEEK Poll, 55% of Americans say that Bill Clinton doesn’t have the honesty and integrity they expect in a president; 40% believe he does
By a 53% to 21% margin, people say that a president’s effectiveness in carrying out policies beneficial to the country matters more than high personal character
72% believe that Clinton could have done a lot more as president if he had not had to deal with the Lewinsky matter, Whitewater and questionable fund-raising
FOR THIS NEWSWEEK POLL, PRINCETON SURVEY RESEARCH ASSOCIATES INTERVIEWED 750 ADULTS BY TELEPHONE AUG. 13-14. THE MARGIN OF ERROR IS +/- 4 PERCENTAGE POINTS. THE NEWSWEEK POLL (c) 1998 BY NEWSWEEK, INC.
