Sunday, Jul 20, 2008
Even as journalists admit "The Clinton Wars" reveals the insanity of the right-wing crusade against the president, they're dismissing the book as "history."
Jun 9, 2003 | Five years ago, I testified before Congress that history would harshly judge the unconstitutional impeachment drive against President Clinton. My position was fairly mainstream among American historians. By the time I testified, nearly 500 had signed a letter I helped to write with the distinguished scholars Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and C. Vann Woodward, deploring the impeachment on historical and constitutional grounds. Soon thereafter, a group of more than 400 leading legal scholars, including Cass Sunstein and Laurence Tribe, issued a similar statement.
Not surprisingly, Republicans lambasted both the historians' letter and my testimony, as did journalists and pundits playing amateur historians inside the right-wing media echo chamber. A group of 90 writers -- only three of them historians, but with a heavy contingent from the right-wing think tanks plus partisan ideologues from the Reagan and first Bush administrations, such as C. Boyden Gray -- composed a counter-statement attacking the historians. But a wide range of editorial writers and columnists in the so-called "liberal media" also denounced the historians for being "gratuitous" "condescending" and "partisan."
The historians' verdict was clear: The impeachment drive against President Clinton lacked constitutional and political legitimacy. The journalists' opinion was equally clear: The impeachment was legitimate, and the historians were really a fusty collection of liberal elitists who had no business sticking their noses into public affairs.
Now an extraordinary thing has happened. Journalists from across the political spectrum are finally acknowledging that impeachment was mostly a partisan crusade on trumped-up charges to bring down a popular president. "From the viewpoint of history," the conservative Andrew Sullivan wrote recently in the New York Observer, "it's going to seem deranged." They have conceded that numerous allegations noisily leveled against Clinton and repeated endlessly in the news media of which they are a part have turned out to be bogus.
The occasion for this sea change in conventional wisdom is the publication of Sidney Blumenthal's "The Clinton Wars" and the response to it. (I should note that Blumenthal and I have been friends ever since we both wrote for the New Republic, that I read and corrected some of "The Clinton Wars"' background historical material in manuscript, and that I, along with Schlesinger, Sunstein and others, am treated kindly in the book.) But what has struck me, now that the reviews of the book have started pouring in, is how an old pattern has reappeared in a new form: Historians and journalists disagree about the book's import.
Even as journalists admit that Blumenthal has the goods to prove what a right-wing circus impeachment really was, they dismiss his revelations as score-settling, and worse -- as "history." The spectacle of the media, having gotten the story wrong in the first place, dismissing the book that gets it right is stunning, even to someone who lived through the actual impeachment.
Meanwhile, the most respectful reviews have come from historians -- Robert Dallek in the New York Times Book Review and David Greenberg in the Washington Monthly. Though not uncritical, both warmly praised the book's reconstruction of the historical record and called it the place to start in order to understand the Clinton presidency. Once again, the historians get the story right.
Journalists have attacked Blumenthal, a controversial figure in Washington press circles, for writing a memoir they deem a courtier's brief -- too one-sided, partisan and uncritical of Clinton. History is of less interest to these journalists than Blumenthal's personality, his devotion to the Clintons, and various trivial matters of great import to the news media, like whether "Hardball" host and Clinton-hater Chris Matthews really did lobby for the job as Clinton's press secretary.
Yet in working up their ad hominem cases against Blumenthal, even his journalist critics concede that the book's exposure of the partisan campaign against Clinton that culminated in the impeachment is accurate and persuasive.
A sampling:
Andrew Sullivan in the New York Observer: "The real value of this book is in its portrait of Mr. Clinton's foes ... .[T]he account Mr. Blumenthal gives of the haplessness and priggishness of Kenneth Starr is riveting stuff. The testimony of Sam Dash, Mr. Starr's ethics advisor, is particularly damning. The insane attempt to actually bring down a President over perjury in a civil suit has not yet been more vividly evoked."
Janet Maslin in the New York Times: "Certainly "The Clinton Wars" can point to baseless, breathless news coverage as a catalyst to the Kafkaesque."
Lev Grossman in Time: "Blumenthal's abiding theme is that Clinton's presidency was the victim of a right-wing political cabal that manipulated the media and the legal system to make mountains out of dunghills, and he makes a surprisingly convincing case by doggedly following countless news stories and allegations to their origins in tainted, planted, unfounded, retracted, distorted, misleading and plain nonexistent evidence."
Bill Bell in the New York Daily News: "No question, the Clintons were dogged by some extremely malignant, ignorant and hypocritical extremists, funded by a few rich conservatives ... .Beyond the settling of grudges and slights, though, is a bigger, dramatic story -- of the impeachment itself -- and Blumenthal's riveting account is sharp, spare and focused. It pulses with the energy of clashing ideologies and strategies and is propelled by the force of the legal, political and reputational stakes involved. It sets the standard for subsequent reports, including the one his Oval Office boss is writing."
Joseph Lelyveld in the New York Review of Books: "Blumenthal holds your attention when he pieces together the various components of what Mrs. Clinton called a "vast right-wing conspiracy," from Little Rock enemies and haters to the lawyers of the Federalist Society who worked their connections to the Office of the Independent Counsel to shift its focus from real estate to sex ... .Disgraceful things did happen. On more than one occasion, an Internet gossip columnist did set the agenda for mainstream news organizations. Stories without sources did gain instant currency. Some were fabricated."
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