...I had become utterly convinced, as early as the 1992 campaign, that there was something in the Clinton makeup that was quite seriously nasty. The automatic lying, the glacial ruthlessness, the self-pity, the indifference to repeated exposure, the absence of any tincture of conscience or remorse, the awful piety—these were symptoms of a psychopath. And it kept on getting worse and worse—but not for Clinton himself, who could usually find a way of sacrificing a subordinate and then biting his lip in the only gesture of contrition he had learned to master. (After reading the testimony of Juanita Broaddrick, I’ll never be able to think of his lip biting in the same way again. But no doubt Arthur Schlesinger will be on hand to assure us that all men lie about rape.)
Hitchens writes about his friendship with Sidney Blumenthal, who we read a lot about in Hillary's emails. Blumenthal tried to persuade Hitchens that Monica Lewinsky was a stalker. Hitchens writes,
A president, if you think about it for a second, just can’t be stalked in his own Oval Office.) However, as time went by, the significance of the conversation metamorphosed. I became convinced that, a few weeks before the lunch, Kathleen Willey had been threatened in person, had received threats against her children by name, and earlier had had her car brutally vandalized. I discovered that, within days of the lunch, she received a telephone call from a private detective named Jared Stern. Hired to invigilate her, he had sickened of his work and decided to give her an anonymous call warning her that she had influential enemies. It also appeared that Ms. Willey had been subjected to pressure by a politically connected tycoon named Nathan Landow, whom I knew by reputation as one of the less decorative members of Clinton’s soft-money world. (Asked by the grand jury whether he spoke to Ms. Willey about her testimony in the Paula Jones lawsuit on his own behalf or on the president’s, Mr. Landow has taken the Fifth Amendment.) I refuse to believe for a second that Sidney knew anything about this, but in the week that we talked, the White House “found” and released Ms. Willey’s correspondence with Clinton. I say “found” because when these same letters had been subpoenaed in the Jones case in January 1998, they couldn’t be located anywhere. Just another day in Clinton’s Washington.Read more here.
...t hit me very abruptly, when I was having a drink with Erik Tarloff, Chris Buckley’s only rival as D.C.’s first satirical fictionist. As well as having contributed to speeches for Clinton and Gore, Erik is married to Laura D’Andrea Tyson, formerly Clinton’s chief economic adviser. He’s a shrewd guy, and he’s seen a lot of the Clinton M.O. “Notice how they always trash the accusers,” he said. “They destroy their reputations. If Monica hadn’t had that blue dress, they were getting ready to portray her as a fantasist and erotomaniac. Imagine what we’d all be thinking about her now.”
How, then, did the White House expect to get away with the lie? They expected to get away with it because they had made everyone complicit. In a city where the main “source” is the government, the etiquette about sources masks the plain fact that the government has a lock on the press. (One survey, which took 2,850 news stories from The Washington Post and The New York Times, found that 78 percent of the stories were attributed to government sources either on or off the record. Talk about ventriloquism. The state uses the media as a megaphone.)
Here’s what I mean. On January 23, Charles Ruff, the counsel to the president, told the Senate trial the following whopper: “The White House, the president, the president’s agents, the president’s spokes-persons—no one has ever trashed, threatened, maligned, or done anything else to Monica Lewinsky. No one.” (I know who the president’s spokespersons are, I recall thinking at the time. But who are these “agents”?) The following day, James Warren, the excellent Washington-bureau chief of the Chicago Tribune, was asked to comment on CNN:
That comment by Ruff was so palpably untrue. If I had a buck for every person at the White House who bad-mouthed her to me last January I could leave the set now and head off to Antigua.
I barely know a single reporter who could not have sworn to the same. And indeed, I do know at least one reporter who was approached by the House Judiciary Committee and asked to testify. He said no. He has to live here, and he can’t commit his newspaper. I don’t have to live here. Still and all, I wish it had been Ruff rather than Sidney I heard putting the story about. As it is, the state now has a new weapon against the press. Don’t be calling the president a liar. You’ll be accused of snitching on his juniors.
When Susan Bogart, senior investigative counsel of the House Judiciary Committee, contacted me in the closing days of the trial, she asked a question to which she already knew the answer. I had put a version of the lunch with Sidney in print, in the London Independent of September 13, 1998. I had told many people. I was in the process of writing a column for a small, pro-Clinton weekly magazine, in which I was proposing to tell it again. Furthermore, the story had the merit of being true, and of being revealing of the squalid underside of Clintonism. Every time I told it, I now realize, I was placing a friend in potential jeopardy, but only because he had elected to join the president’s bodyguard. In order to disown the story, I would have had to join the general agreement about “putting this behind us and moving on.” Well, I didn’t want to join any bloody agreement about putting things behind us and moving on. I thought it was a disgrace to have a mock trial, invisibly sponsored by the stock market and the opinion polls, at which the defendant didn’t appear and at which all efforts to mention Kathleen Willey and Juanita Broaddrick were quashed. The stocks are sold, the press is squared—include me out. To disown the story, also, I would have had to risk committing perjury, in order to accuse myself of having lied in the first place, in order to safeguard a dirty tactic used by Clinton’s proxies. Well, thanks, but then again, no thanks. That would’ve been Clintonism squared or cubed. And why didn’t I run out the clock, people ask me, and get clever with lawyers and delaying tactics? That’s easy. The trial of Clinton was in its closing stages. If I strung the prosecution along, anything they later established from me could be used only against someone other than the Godfather.
So I said that, if need be, I would confirm the Lewinsky stalker stuff under oath. I also put in the material about Kathleen Willey, without being asked, so as to help establish the White House state of mind. By the time you read this, the name Willey may be much better known than it is now, and people will be ashamed that they ever spoke so fatuously about “consensual sex.” No one has bothered to notice that I went out of my way to include Willey in the affidavit, because Sidney hasn’t been asked about it under oath and doesn’t know much about it anyway, and therefore it doesn’t help the only story that people seem to care about, which is fratricide between Sidney and me. A silly town, as I said, and sometimes a spiteful one, too. A town where, as the Chinese say, when the finger points at the moon, the idiots look at the finger.
The rest of the conversation with the House Judiciary Committee—actually the bulk of the conversation—consisted of my making a moral stipulation. This affidavit was being given in the trial of one person only: the president. It was being given as a rebuttal to a White House strategy of deception. Since grand-jury testimony had elicited the fact that Clinton was the sole author of the “stalker” slander, that he had passed it to Sidney and probably others, and had seen it get into the press, I wasn’t doing more than filling in one blank. In Senate evidence, Sidney had said that he now felt he’d been lied to by his president. He wasn’t the only one who had that feeling. So it would obviously be grotesque to proceed against him for the mere offense of giving an evasive answer. Any use of my affidavit for this purpose, I said, would cause me to repudiate it and risk being held in contempt. I would testify again only about Kathleen Willey. There are no absolute guarantees in this world, but I do know that what I said was understood. Anyway, the offense of perjury has been so downwardly defined by the Clintonoids that it can’t seriously be charged against a perjurer’s apprentice. Morally, also, it has been defined by the Democratic leadership as an offense only slightly worse than telling the truth.
And for doing that, I have already been held in contempt. But in Clinton’s Washington, it is a positive honor to be despised.
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