War By Other Means

Last week, despite Christmas parties and shopping to finish, you could feel America at war with itself. Not even the specter of a hated foreign adversary and the nightly bombings of Iraq--green night-scope images of flares and antiaircraft fire hurtling across Baghdad’s sky--could keep us from our civil war.

But the impeachment of a president must necessarily turn the nation against itself. The legislative branch of government seeks to undo the executive branch. More pointedly, legislators overrule the vote of the people when they impeach a president, that is what the procedure means.

For all the incomprehension that each side has expressed toward the other, there has been a strangely intimate aspect to the impeachment story. From the day William Jefferson Clinton became president, one noticed a hostility toward him that was nothing if not familial. What’s intriguing about Clinton’s harshest critics (the so-called Clinton-haters) is that they are mainly Southern, middle-age white men much like the president himself.

Indeed, the story of Clinton and his moral critics has not been the story of Catholics versus Protestants or Muslims versus Jews. It has been a saga of Southern Baptists versus Southern Baptists. While Republicans from other parts of the country, especially the Northeast, indicated an inclination to censure the president, the drive for impeachment was spearheaded by men of Clinton’s faith.

I remember House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) standing beside Clinton, a few years ago, when both men were described in the press as the most important political “rivals” in America. I remember being struck instead by how similar the two men were, in both physical and intellectual stature, as well as reputation (rumors of scandal attached to both), and how both were men of big vision from the small-town South.

This past week, despite Christmas lights twinkling in the malls, one had the sense that Americans were at war with their shadows. On the radio, there was Rush Limbaugh, a man who has turned presidential mockery into a career. The thrice-married Limbaugh, a man who, like the president, never served in the armed forces, a Southerner, has perfected his mimicry of Clinton’s cloudy voice. Only kin can manage an imitation so flawless.

It was terrible enough in the Civil War when the national family dissolved, as Unionists fought Confederates; more horrific were those instances when the conflict became intimate, turning brother against brother. Family quarrels are always more mysterious and more intense than conflicts between strangers.

Tom Wolfe has written a fat novel about the New South, about Atlanta’s glass skyscrapers and black-and-white sex, that is currently at the top of the nation’s best-seller list. But Wolfe is a cartoonist of American life, a sloganeer. The story of what it was like to be in the United States, North or South, during this last week of bombing in Iraq and bombast in Washington would require a more subtle telling.

A few months ago (the only time I’ve ever met the president), Clinton quietly told a flattering story about himself. He remembered how, in high school, he was always curious about the kids who sat on the other side of the cafeteria. They were the ones he always wanted to meet, the ones he crossed the room one day to meet. He didn’t say it, but I understood him to mean that they were black kids.

Clinton, the small-town, white Southern boy, is, as has been often remarked, the first U.S. president whose close friends are black. He is a Southerner, but educated in the North. The Bubba White House is, in fact, also staffed by many Jews and Ivy League intellectuals. And feminists. The odd thing: If the sharpest critics of the president’s sexual misbehavior have been Southern men (a number of whom, it turns out, have sexual secrets of their own), some of the president’s strongest defenders have been women, members of the East Coast feminist establishment.

Early last week, a friend from New York phoned to say that she was in Washington with a group of women friends. They are all married, mothers and working women of the middle class. There they were, on the steps of the Capitol, on an overcast Thursday, to protest the impeachment of a womanizing president, a man who has, by his own admission, had sexual relations with a subordinate in the workplace.

My friend (white, middle-age) did not talk about saving Clinton as much as she admitted her fear of “the Christian right”--those smiling evangelicals and white, male defenders of “family values”--she supposed were behind the drive to impeach the president. “This impeachment business,” she said, “it’s not about perjury, not really, it’s all about sex--not Monica’s sex--but my right to have an abortion.”

At Gold’s Gym in San Francisco, on Thursday afternoon, several oversized bodybuilders laughed at the hypocrisy of it all when it was announced on CNN that Bob Livingston (R-La.)--who on Saturday stepped down as House speaker-elect--had admitted to past adulterous affairs. The woman on the neighboring treadmill muttered to me that “straight men are pigs.”

The most interesting remark uttered all week, however, was Livingston’s comment to Eleanor Smeal, the Feminist Majority president, and several other feminist group leaders. Livingston said his own mother, who raised two children after her divorce in the 1950s, was as much a feminist as any of them--”and she’s in favor of impeachment.”

Clearly, there is an important subtext to the impeachment story, but it only got muttered last week in stray sentences, was never alluded to in the formal speeches in the House of Representatives. The subtext has to do with the way men and women regard each other in America. Divorces and abortions. Tears and silence. The bedroom. The kitchen.

The irony is that Clinton, the man at the center of so many words last week, is an enigma, the Southerner who went to Washington with less ideology than pragmatism. Here is a New Democrat who was willing to usurp the Republican agenda, for example, when it suited him. Here is a technocrat who, in a sense, was not there at all.

His supporters and his critics, by contrast, are the ideologues. Which resulted, last week, in several awkward ironies. Critics of the president, from the political right, longtime militarists, such as Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott R-Miss.), found themselves sharply questioning the president’s decision to bomb Iraq. On the other hand, Americans opposing the impeachment of the president, like Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), a longtime critic of U.S. military policy, found themselves defending his bombing of Iraq.

Who can say? The New South is probably still very much a place of ghosts and shadows. Who can explain the hostility of white men, Southern Baptists, to one of their own? Who can say why my woman friend in New York finds the womanizing Clinton less objectionable than an America governed by puritan Republicans?

In the end, it was clear, a bright week before Christmas, that the new American civil war is only beginning.*