Site Presented By
Sunday, Nov 29, 2009
There was a plot to get President Clinton, argues Jeffrey Toobin. It just wasn't the one you think.
Jan 18, 2000 | The vast majority of Americans probably don't want to think about the Clinton crisis ever again. Even the most lubricious revelers in the affair -- and who can claim to have endured this endless political snuff movie without doing a little furtive wallowing? -- must by now be suffering from a monumental case of post-unconsummated-oral-sex tristesse. We're sick of the media frenzy, sick of the culture war, sick of the breast-beating analysis. The whole sordid episode already seems, mercifully, never to have happened. Why on earth would anyone want to relive the ugliest one-night stand in American political history?
But before tuning the whole thing permanently out, it's worth remembering that a little over a year ago the nation saw what should have been merely an embarrassing episode in the career of a randy politician turned into a constitutional crisis. The Clinton affair was a bedroom farce that could have ended as tragedy. In all probability, only a harried prosecutor's badly worded definition of "sex" prevented an American president from being removed from office for the crime of lying under oath about a consensual sexual affair. Instead of amusing ourselves with ever more gargantuan corporate copulations, we could be in a toxic civil landscape, the tanks of triumphant Limbaughism rumbling against an army of bitter, morally relativist boomers. Which is why it's important, now that partisan passions have cooled, to look at exactly how and why this gigantic mess landed in our laps.
Jeffrey Toobin's "A Vast Conspiracy" is a lucid, level-headed and ultimately convincing recounting, from a largely legal perspective, of what is sure to be regarded by future historians as one of the weirdest and unloveliest episodes in American history. Toobin is the legal expert at the New Yorker and ABC News, and his expertise helps him to blow the hysterical smoke out of the room and recount exactly what happened. This in itself is a valuable service, because the Clinton crisis is one of those murky stories whose true (and frightening) absurdity only becomes clear when it is anatomized.
The title of Toobin's book is taken, of course, from Hillary Clinton's famous statement on the "Today" show that "the great story here ... is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president." Toobin, who is no Clinton apologist, points out that her statement ignored her husband's culpability, that many of the "conspirators" didn't know each other and that when she made her statement there was no evidence that any of them had broken the law. And indeed, he finds little evidence of illegal activity throughout the affair. Nonetheless, he believes that her "charge had -- and has -- the unmistakable ring of truth. The Paula Jones and Whitewater investigations existed only because of the efforts of Clinton's right-wing political enemies. People who hated the Clintons initiated these projects and sustained them through many years. To put it another way, there was no one of importance behind either the Starr investigation or the Paula Jones case who was not already a dedicated political adversary of the Clintons."
The story, in short, is of how a host of ideologues, zealots, ax-grinding hustlers, professional Clinton-haters and useful journalists connived to keep not one, but two flimsy legal cases against the president of the United States alive until, in a dramatic climax out of Aeschylus by way of Larry Flynt, the protagonist's tragic inability to keep his pants up almost brought him down.
Unfortunately, Toobin scarcely mentions a major element in the "vast conspiracy," the covert operations funded by far-right Pittsburgh billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife. Nor does he give readers much of a sense of the bizarre texture, the strange commingling of deep-fried kooks and respectable establishment figures, that made up the anti-Clinton forces. Readers who want to plunge into that seamy soup should turn to Joe Conason and Gene Lyons' forthcoming book, "The Hunting of the President," which makes an excellent complementary volume to Toobin's. (Conason is a Salon columnist; both journalists have written extensively about the Clinton crisis in these pages.)
Of the rogues' gallery of characters, Toobin is especially harsh on three: The so-called "elves," the loose alliance of high-powered lawyers and financiers who, driven by hatred of Clinton, secretly lent their expertise to Paula Jones' team and other anti-Clinton groups; independent counsel Kenneth Starr and his team; and journalist Michael Isikoff.
Of two of the main "elves" (the name the secret group gave itself), Richard Porter and Jerome Marcus, Toobin writes, "The issue was not what they did but why they did it ... Most public interest lawyers volunteer for a case because they believe in a cause -- an area of law they want to change. Here, in contrast, Porter, Marcus and their later recruits had no interest or expertise in sexual harassment law. To the extent that they cared at all about the state of the law in this area, they were more sympathetic to defendants than plaintiffs. They joined the cause of this sexual harassment plaintiff [Jones] because their agenda was to try -- in secret -- to damage Bill Clinton's presidency. Their involvement was a classic demonstration of the legal system's takeover of the political system. Indeed, [they] used this lawsuit like a kind of after-the-fact election, to use briefs, subpoenas, and interrogations to undo in secret what the voters had done in the most public of American proceedings."
For Toobin, then, there were not one but two conspiracies: the conspiracy of the elves and other Clinton enemies, and a deeper, structural one -- what he calls "a conspiracy within the legal system to take over the political system of the United States." This pernicious process started, Toobin says, with the best of intentions: the legal activism of Thurgood Marshall and the NAACP, who after World War II were forced to use the courts because racist voter-registration laws ruled out legislative redress. It was initially a favorite tactic of the political left. But inevitably the right, too, discovered legal activism, and embraced "many of the same legal concepts that their adversaries had pioneered -- freedom of speech, equal protection of the laws, and even, eventually, sexual harassment law -- to achieve their aims." And the chief aim of many of the most obsessed conservatives at the end of the century was the removal from office of William Jefferson Clinton.
