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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
The journalist brings all his bile to bear on the president he hates.
Jun 7, 1999 | "No One Left to Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton," a slim little book by Christopher Hitchens, comes to a close with a slim little index. As anyone who has ever dieted knows, slimness is not achieved without sacrifice. As evidence of the sacrifices Hitchens has made, and as a service to the prospective reader, allow me to offer some names you will not find in the index, nor anywhere else in his trim, tidy tome: Rutherford Institute, the; Arkansas Project, the; Hale, David; Scaife, Richard Mellon; Steele, Julie Hiatt; McDougal, Susan.
But worthiness is not measured by size alone, and though "No One Left to Lie To" is diminutive, it aims to be the Brave Little Diatribe That Could, the book that will once and for all expose the mendacity and corruption and just plain rottenness that is Clintonism. To accomplish that goal, Hitchens will muster all the contempt he had nurtured for Clinton over the past seven years and set off chugging uphill.
It seems appropriate to invoke a children's story, since the element of instruction lies heavy upon "No One Left to Lie To." Hitchens means to illuminate those fissures in the Clinton saga that have escaped us -- or more probably, according to him, that we have chosen to ignore. And in doing so he has, unconsciously or not, adopted the guise of two familiar figures of moral instruction, shifting between the idealistic Capraesque hero inspired with a shining vision of what government should be and the stern Victorian father upholding virtue by remaining forever on guard against the serpent worming its way into the bosom of decency. You can glimpse this father figure at work in the book's preface, in the service of a story that, Hitchens eventually gets around to telling us, is not true. His approach in these passages reveals something about the essence of the book.
This story begins in 1995, when Hitchens and his editors at Vanity Fair were approached by a woman claiming to have had a child by Clinton. Photos of the baby provided "an almost offputting resemblance to the putative father." The reasons Hitchens and his editors decided against pursuing the story are worth quoting:
First of all -- and even assuming the truth of the story -- the little boy had been conceived when Mr. Clinton was the Governor of Arkansas. At that time, he had not begun his highly popular campaign against defenseless indigent mothers. Nor had he emerged as the upright scourge of the "deadbeat dad" or absent father. The woman -- perhaps because she had African genes and worked as a prostitute -- had not been rewarded with a state job, even of the lowly kind bestowed on Gennifer Flowers. There seemed, in other words, to be no political irony or contradiction of the sort that sometimes licenses a righteous press in the exposure of iniquity.
As a rationale for not pursuing a story, this line of thought is on par with the question "When did you stop beating your wife?" Hitchens decides that you can't charge someone with hypocrisy retroactively -- that's the only quarter Clinton is given -- and then congratulates himself on his journalistic ethics. But follow the logic of the passage: Had Clinton -- "even assuming the truth of the story" -- done something to provide for this woman and her child, it would probably have taken the form of padding the public payroll. That he didn't, Hitchens surmises, is probably due to his racism.
We have entered a strange realm here, where divination meets character assassination. Like someone who gets tipsy on one glass of cheap champagne, Hitchens gets so buzzed on the black-baby scenario that it isn't until three pages into the tale that he gets around to telling us it proved to be false. And even then he doesn't come all the way down from his high: "Still, I couldn't but notice that White House spokesmen, when bluntly asked about the ... story by reporters, reacted as if it could be true." What a beautifully Orwellian construct! And how convenient. Hitchens can claim he's fulfilled his ethical obligations as a journalist while spreading a smear story. "For reasons of professional rather than political feeling," he concludes, "I felt glad that [Vanity Fair editor] Graydon Carter and I had put privacy (and scruples that arose partly from the fatherhood of our own daughters) ahead of sensation all those years ago." So fatherhood (Hitchens has dedicated the book to his daughters) and, he claims, concern for Chelsea Clinton are what held him in check. Young womanhood can sleep soundly tonight. Vicar Hitchens is on the watch.
