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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Sidney Blumenthal talks about his new tell-all Clinton memoir, the New York Times scandal bigger than Jayson Blair, why liberals shouldn't run from Fox News, and how Democrats can beat the Bushes.
May 21, 2003 | Sidney Blumenthal was raised in the rough and tumble world of a Chicago Jewish family, where men were not above using their fists to settle arguments or getting job offers from Bugsy Siegel and double-dating with Jack Ruby. His first political job came as a boy working for the bare-knuckled Daley machine and his first political hero was the handsome young Jack Kennedy, who swept through Chicago on his way to the White House -- a man who embodied an idealistic vision of the future, but whose family was also not above scrapping their way to victory.
Blumenthal would take both his idealism and his combativeness with him when he joined the Clinton White House in 1997 as a senior advisor. Blumenthal began his career as a political reporter, but other journalists later denounced him as a partisan hack for writing in glowing terms about the Clintons, whom he met during their rise to national prominence, and then going to work for them. Conservative enemies branded him "Sid Vicious" and "Bill's Dirt Devil" for the way he gave as good as he got during the savage impeachment battle. But many Clinton supporters came to respect Blumenthal for the shrewd toughness he brought to politics -- an attribute in short supply in weak-willed Democratic circles.
Blumenthal faded from the spotlight after the Clinton administration gave way to the Bush restoration. But he is back -- some would say with a vengeance -- with his new book, "The Clinton Wars," recently serialized by Salon and in stores this week. Some have called the riveting, inside look at the Clinton White House and the political bonfires that besieged it "Blumenthal's payback," his chance to get even with all those who brought him and his president misery -- from Ken Starr to Matt Drudge (who falsely accused Blumenthal of being a wife-beater) to Christopher Hitchens (who betrayed his old friend in an 11th-hour gambit to convict Clinton in the Senate). But Blumenthal insists he is simply trying to "set the record straight."
We caught up with Blumenthal this week at the W Hotel in midtown Manhattan, as his book tour began. He chatted about the pleasures of jousting with Fox News' Sean Hannity, why the New York Times' Whitewater coverage remains a bigger journalistic scandal than any offense committed by disgraced reporter Jayson Blair, and what Democratic presidential contenders can learn from Clinton when it comes to beating the Bushes.
How's the book tour going? Are you getting attacked by the right-wing conspiracy?
As a matter of fact, I just finished doing Sean Hannity's radio show. He had me on for 45 minutes; he wanted me to do the whole hour, but I told him I had to run for this interview.
David, excuse me, it's the president on the other line. Can I call you back?
[Twenty minutes later]
So how's the president doing?
I'm sorry, I couldn't get him [Clinton] off the phone -- he's pumped about all this stuff. It's the first book that puts his administration in a historical context and conveys all the inside details of what went on.
So, back to Hannity and Fox.
Hannity apparently liked the book, we had a good time together; he seemed to like talking to someone with a different point of view. We talked about the Starr inquisition. I asked him, "Would it have helped the country if JFK had been investigated for his affair with an intern by a Ken Starr during the Cuban missile crisis?"
Hannity said to me, "Come on, am I and the people here at Fox really part of the vast right-wing conspiracy?" I said, "Why on earth do you want to deny that you and your friends are running the country? Just buy my book and look at the index -- you'll see who's in the vast conspiracy."
Why did you decide to go on Hannity's show? A lot of liberals boycott Fox because they feel they're just used as chum for the sharks.
Hannity's is the second biggest radio show after Limbaugh and he's the second biggest cable TV pundit after O'Reilly; I hadn't paid a lot of attention to him before. But I was glad to go toe to toe. I didn't find him mean-spirited. He tried to ask slanted questions that pushed me back on my heels, but I felt fine firing back -- and he let me speak. In fact he just asked me to go on his TV show this week.
In some ways it seems the liberal New York Times has a more antagonistic relationship with Clintonites like you than Fox does.
Well, the Times has taken the book seriously. David Carr did a fair and balanced report. Janet Maslin's review fit in with a number of other journalists -- she took every single thing out of context. She never challenged any facts, said my portrait of Starr was correct, and called the book highly readable -- but she acted as if Whitewater was a settled matter and that it was indeed a scandal. Whereas everyone who knows the facts knows that every single federal agency has cleared the Clintons. I have found that some journalists simply write for other journalists -- they write for the pack.
But Robert Dallek's review in the Sunday Book Review section, on the other hand, was by a very serious American historian. He's an uninterested party and he reviewed it as a contribution to history. That's a marker and a standard.
"The Clinton Wars" is far from an apologia like one of those Nixon aide memoirs that were written from prison. I set out to write a political history and firsthand memoir by someone who had immediate access to the West Wing, the president, the first lady, and was a participant in the events of the time. Not only to write about the important turning points, but the sensibility in the White House, and to put the Clinton administration into historical context. To have written otherwise would have been very detrimental to history. Do you know the book "Reveille in Washington," by Margaret Leech -- about life in Washington during the Civil War? It had a big impact on me. My book is life in Washington during the Clinton wars.
And yet many people simply see your book as a settling of scores, Blumenthal payback for all the grief that you and Clinton took during those years.
I don't think of this as a settling of scores, but a clarifying of the record. I couldn't talk about people like Christopher Hitchens at the time, because it would have been against the interests of the president to have focused on a sensational story at just the moment the president was being acquitted. I haven't written this book with a mean spirit, with invective.
I write about people who were an important part of the story but who have never been chronicled -- in some cases, because they're in the media, and the media doesn't cover itself. I show how parts of media got the story all wrong, from Whitewater on, how they got invested in it, became Starr "informers" to use his word, how social Washington became a vicious anti-Clinton clique and did not reflect the confidence of a governing class that once existed.
