Through a Funhouse Mirror

Almost everyone assumes these days that Marxism is dead, and for good reason. Even in Cuba, one of the last bastions of the Marxist faith, Fidel Castro has had to seek help from Pope John Paul II, one of the most charismatic anti-Marxists of our time. And yet, bizarrely, the news of President Bill Clinton’s current crisis suggests that Karl Marx may not have been as wrong-headed as we now think he was.

“Hegel remarks somewhere,” the old communist wrote in 1852, “that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were twice. He forgot to add: The first time as tragedy, the second as farce.”

Marx was talking about the French Revolution of 1848 and its aftermath, and how those events recalled, in burlesqued ways, the original French Revolution of 1789 and the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte. Today, in Washington, we are witnessing bits and pieces of an earlier American tragedy, the crimes collectively known as Watergate, recycled eerily in the sexual and political farce being played out by Clinton and his accusers. What happened before seems to be happening again, but as if in a funhouse mirror.

Of course, the two episodes are quite distinct. Watergate, for all its seamy subplots, had a dark classical grandeur about it, more Roman than Greek, involving senators, scholars, centurions and schemers in a struggle that, though intensely personal, also struck to the core of the republic’s political soul. Coming as the ugly culmination of an entire era of American politics--an era marked by civil strife, assassinations, extraordinary heroism and extraordinary treachery--President Richard M. Nixon’s downfall had obvious historical importance and excruciating psychological gravity, worthy of a latter-day William Shakespeare or Edward Gibbon.

Today’s scandal, by contrast, involves no great constitutional issues, is unconnected to recent history and is nothing but seamy subplots, a drama worthy of Danielle Steele. Nonetheless, watching the current scandal unfold, one is gripped by the distorted deja vu that Marx described so well.

The neo-Nixonian tremors began when reporters revealed that Monica S. Lewinsky had holed up in her mother’s apartment in--of all places--the Watergate complex. Some liberal conspiracy-mongers have noted that mother’s digs just happen to be next door to Bob and Elizabeth Dole’s, a hint, they say, that young Lewinsky is an agent in some sort of GOP plot. The Marxist view is more sophisticated: Lewinsky’s weird Watergate connection was merely an early indication of more such historical connections to come.

There is, for example, the story of Lucianne S. Goldberg, the New York book agent, who prompted Linda R. Tripp to tape conversations with her buddy, Lewinsky. No run-of-the-mill Clinton-hating nut, Goldberg spent the 1972 campaign as a good-looking spy for Nixon’s CREEP, posing as a reporter, infiltrating candidate George S. McGovern’s entourage, and passing dirt along to Nixon’s hatchet-man, Murray Chotiner. The sleazy bit-player of the Watergate era has become one of the sleazy stars of this scandal. First tragedy, then farce.

And there’s more. There are the transcripts of sensational secret tape recordings--under Nixon, tapes gathered inside the Oval Office; under Clinton, tapes gathered in hotels, barrooms and the Pentagon Starbucks. There’s the reappearance of Hillary Rodham, idealistic young staffer for the House Judiciary Committee, as Hillary Rodham Clinton, calculating and beleaguered first lady. There’s Nixon’s private secretary and tape-keeper, Rose Mary Woods, testifying loyally on behalf of her boss, now replaced by Clinton’s private secretary and gate-keeper, Betty Currie, testifying loyally on behalf of her boss.

There’s the Supreme Court connection, with the (noble) landmark decision in U.S. vs. Nixon giving away to the (dubious) landmark decision in Jones vs. Clinton. Nixon had major world historical figures such as Mao Tse-tung and the OPEC ministers to distract him; Clinton has Saddam Hussein. The intrepid investigative reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein have now transmogrified into a single character, the cyberspace tattler Matt Drudge. On the radio, the ex-con talk-show host G. Gordon Liddy predicts that Clinton, like Liddy’s old boss Nixon, will be destroyed not by his crimes but by his cover-ups. Instead of Watergate’s metaphorical Deep Throat I, we may have an all-too-graphic Deep Throat II. And so the strange reprises continue.

As a Democrat and, indeed, as a citizen, I hope the president is being truthful, that Lewinsky is just a flake, and that the whole story will turn out to be a brief nasty chapter in the chronicle of the Clinton presidency. But, as a historian, hearing the odd echoes of Watergate, I will not be surprised if Clinton turns out to be guilty and suffers a farcical fall. For in history, as Marx observed, the tradition of past generations “weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.”