There is no reason to suppose that Melvin should have known it – he was 13 when Clinton was first inaugurated, and 18 when the Lewinsky matter exploded – but his interview was replete with Clinton riffs that go back a quarter-century or more. Clinton argued that his own supporters wanted more fight, and wanted him to attack the legitimacy of independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s investigation.
Finally, it is often at moments when people expect Clinton to be most cheerful or filled with generous reflections that the grievances he nurtures pierce through the surface.
People say they want authenticity from politicians-just show us what you really feel-but when Bill Clinton gave it to them this week on the Today show in his peevish interview about #MeToo and Monica Lewinsky, many viewers were aghast and indignantly demanded a show of artifice.
Clinton later complied, in part, uttering contrite words in what Stephen Colbert offered as a “do-over” interview. But the original display-defiant, self-justifying, “tone deaf,” in CNN’s description, a “meltdown” in the Washington Post’s-was the more important window into understanding an old man at a new moment.
Part of the Today show interview revealed Clinton as painfully behind the times in his understanding of how recent events have changed the public conversation about sexuality, power, and respect for women. He spoke accurately about the big personal and financial price he paid for his transgressions and sincerely (or so it seemed to me) about how badly he felt over his own lapses. But he gave no hint that he understood that what the modern audience is clamoring for is a sign that he understands the price other people paid for his behavior, including the woman who was an intern of 22 when they began their West Wing affair. He suggested a public apology to Lewinsky 20 years ago had paid that debt in full and declined even to speak her name.
That part of the interview obscured another part that was just as important. We can now see the Clinton of the 1990s as a man far ahead of his times. Whose side are you on-mine or the people who want to destroy me-was the question that Clinton asked to successful effect in 1998. And it is the same question Donald Trump has made the basis of his presidency 20 years later.
That year of scandal was not about rule of law, Clinton argued in 1998, and it was not even about sex. It was about the battle for power. He thought then and still thinks now that Democrats lose by too often acting as if the political-media-scandal complex is on the level when Republicans prove every day that it is not. How else to explain a party that piously said the Constitution gave them no choice but to pursue Clinton’s moral failings over sex and lies but are tolerant and even celebratory about Trump’s failings over sex and lies and tax returns and Russia and cabinet scandals and on and on?
Progressives insist that an ex-president on their team find exactly the right words to express remorse and respect. Conservatives cheer when a president for their side starts his mornings free-associating on Twitter to express self-aggrandizement and contempt. This contrast, one feels sure, was what drove Clinton’s anger on the Today show.
“Do you think President Kennedy should have resigned” for adulterous conduct, Clinton rasped to NBC News interviewer Craig Melvin. “Do you believe President Johnson should have resigned? Someone should ask you these questions..”
An acknowledgment: I could tell right away Clinton broke wind with his answers, but I did not anticipate the acrid, room-clearing effusion that many others perceived.
The explanation, I suppose, is that I had heard these themes-often delivered with more intensity, at higher volume-so many times since I first covered Clinton as a White House reporter in January 1995.
There is no reason to suppose that Melvin should have known it – he was 13 when Clinton was first inaugurated, and 18 when the Lewinsky matter exploded – but his interview was replete with Clinton riffs that go back a quarter-century or more.
No one should be surprised at the difficulty Clinton seemed to have reckoning not with the politics of the Lewinsky case but with the pure human dimension of it. He always seemed to hold this element at an emotional distance.
Lewinsky herself recalled at the time that even after her West Wing flirtations with the president in 1995 crossed the line one night to fellatio in a darkened office that she was not sure Clinton knew her name.
Later, when allegations of an illicit relationship erupted publicly and Clinton was wounded by a series of wobbly and obviously evasive interviews, it was another instance when he needed a “do-over.”
As it happened, I was the print pool reporter in the Roosevelt Room when Clinton-visibly shaking with anger and determination—drew a sharp line that later proved to be false.
“I want you to listen to me,” he said, with sharp jabs of his finger. “I’m going to say this again. I did not have sexual relations with that woman”-the disdain conveyed by the phrase “that woman” was palpable, as was the awkwardness in the moment of dead space before he finished the sentence-“Ms. Lewinsky.”
Perhaps most revealing was the role that Lewinsky played in Clinton’s 2004 memoir, “My Life.” The book is written as a parade of minute details, each day unfolding as Clinton experienced the presidency in real time. Notably, however, Lewinsky enters the narrative not in 1995-when their relationship begun-but in 1998, when the matter became public. The implicit message: her significance was a political crisis to be navigated rather than as a person with whom Clinton became intimately intertwined over two years of West Wing visits and steamy telephone calls.
Clinton’s critics would describe this distance as a sign that he lacks shame, but my own belief-heightened over the years-is that it is more likely reflects the opposite, that his self-reproach ran deeply. He could not reckon publicly with Lewinsky as a person because he had trouble reckoning with his own guilt privately.
Nor should there be much surprise that Clinton bared fangs at an interviewer at precisely the moment when the merits of presenting a different face to the world seemed obvious.
“How could they not be ready for this?” several people asked me, correctly noting that the line of inquiry Melvin, Colbert, and others pursued was easy to anticipate.
A couple answers come to mind.
First, don’t exaggerate the “they.” Bill Clinton, like Hillary Rodham Clinton, doesn’t go out for a big publicity tour without discussions and rehearsals with advisers, but at the end of the day his words are his own. No amount of coaxing-“Sir, that’s well said but in this case it be might be better if you steered clear.”-typically will prevent Clinton from saying something that he believes is important and true.
Which leads to another point. Clinton’s reputation as a silver-tongued slickster is misleading. Certainly, like any politician, he can shovel it on thick when necessary to give some audience or another what they want to hear. But on important matters, in my experience, the gap between what Clinton believed and what comes out of his mouth is more narrow than for many political leaders. As White House reporters in the 1990s, we learned the hard way not to skip evening fund-raisers in which aides told us Clinton was not planning to make news. It was on such occasions that he regularly did make news-by sharing with the audience, as he did with Craig Melvin, what he really thought.
That is what he did in August 1998, when he finally admitted his relationship with Lewinsky. Most advisers wanted him to give a sober speech expressing quiet remorse and leave it at that. Clinton argued that his own supporters wanted more fight, and wanted him to attack the legitimacy of independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s investigation. So that is what he did.
Finally, it is often at moments when people expect Clinton to be most cheerful or filled with generous reflections that the grievances he nurtures pierce through the surface.
In 1996, just after a successful re-election, Clinton self-righteously compared himself to Richard Jewell, the hapless security guard who had been wrongly targeted as a suspect in a bombing at that summer’s Atlanta Olympics.
In 2004, as thousands gathered in Little Rock for the opening of Clinton’s presidential library, he clashed far more heatedly with ABC News anchor Peter Jennings than he did with Melvin in an exchange over his historical legacy. “You don’t want to go there, Peter,” Clinton seethed. “Not after what you people did” with scandal coverage favorable to Starr, “the way your people repeated every little single thing he leaked.”
Long-term, Clinton has always argued that he is winning the argument, and that in historical perspective his presidency will be seen for its accomplishments, and the scandals that buffeted his presidency will be seen as illegitimate.
A victory for Hillary Clinton surely would have advanced that cause. And Clinton would right now be writing a new chapter in his own history, the first president to also be a spouse of a president and a powerful figure on the world stage.
Instead, changing times and changing standards have turned Clinton-for the moment–into a kind of ex-presidential Gatsby, borne back ceaselessly into arguments over his own past.
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